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From Urban Legends to Political Fact-Checking pp 77–106Cite as

Debunking as Hobby, Entertainment, Scholarly Pursuit, and Public Service

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Part of the book series: History of Computing ((HC))

Abstract

The book so far has focused on only two kinds of activities involving scrutiny, urban legend debunking and political fact-checking. The main purpose of this chapter is to show that, in the period 1990–2015, there were a wider set of activities that are associated with scrutiny. Before turning to this main topic, the chapter examines the decade prior to the creation of the public Internet in the early 1990s and shows how urban legends were both spread and studies in pre-Internet technologies such as fax, bulletin boards, and proprietary online service providers such as America OnLine and Prodigy. The chapter then turns to the creation – beginning in the 1980s – of a new academic sub-discipline, the study of contemporary legends, primarily out of the disciplines of folklore studies and sociology. The focus is on one particular organization, the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. The next section focuses on organizations such as Hoaxbusters, Scambusters, and VMyths, which were created as a public service to help individuals and organizations avoid computer viruses, chair letters, and Internet hoaxes through the use of appropriate scrutiny. The following section discusses entertainment. There are two types of entertainment considered here: one type are truth-or-fiction television shows such as Mythbusters and Unsolved Mysteries, which tell a narrative and then ask the audience to determine whether it is true or fake. The films, such as Candyman, and I Know What You Did Last Summer, either provided a full-length account of a single urban legend or offered up multiple urban legends in the same movie. The chapter concludes by pulling together these disparate events into a single coherent narrative involving scrutiny.

The contents of [today’s] legends – macabre happenings, accidents with household machinery, encounters with off-duty royalty, dreadful contaminations of foodstuffs, environment or bodily organs, theft, violence, threat, sexual embarrassments – seem to be novel in legendry. The setting of the time in the recent past and the reliance of the story on modern lifestyles seem further to separate these new forms from traditional legends. Hence we have come to call them ‘contemporary legends’

-Bennett and Smith (1988)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Rankin (2018).

  2. 2.

    The interested reader can find a copy in Anon. (2009).

  3. 3.

    Cooper (2010). Also see Glanton (2006).

  4. 4.

    strangetrue@compuserve.com

  5. 5.

    bluebox 19, Interview with Bill Sones , Writer of Strange But True , Teen Ink, August 20, 2012. http://www.teenink.com/nonfiction/interviews/article/487844/Interview-with-Bill-Sones-Writer-of-Strange-but-True/ (accessed 12 December 2018).

  6. 6.

    “about.com”, Wikipedia

  7. 7.

    On the use of the World Wide Web for the study of urban legends , see Bacon (2011).

  8. 8.

    Because of our focus on the United States, we do not tell here the story of the Centro per la Raccolta delle voci e leggende contemporanee and its journal: Tutte Storie: Notiziario del Centro per la raccolta delle e leggende contemporanee.

  9. 9.

    Below is the definition of ‘contemporary legend’ given by Paul Smith, one of the leading practitioners of this field, However, as we discuss later in this section, Smith had a difficult time arriving at a definition that he believed was representative of this field of study and would pass muster with his colleagues.

    During the course of conversations with relatives, friends, and colleagues, we are often told stories about events which allegedly happened to a “friend of a friend” of theirs. Many of these stories are, of course, true. However, a proportion appears to be what are now recognized as urban legends.

    Urban legends (alternatively described as contemporary, modern or belief, legends or myths) are short and highly mutable traditional narratives, or digests of narratives, which have no definitive texts, formulaic openings or closings, or artistically developed form, and so their traditional nature is not always immediately apparent. When communicated orally, they exist primarily as an informal conversational form, although they are also to be found embedded in other types of discourse (e.g. joke, memorate [an oral narrative from memory relating a personal experience], rumor, personal experience narrative, etc.), and in diverse settings–ranging from news reports to after-dinner speeches. They are also frequently disseminated through the mass media, novels and short stories, by E-mail, FAX and photocopier, and so have a wide international circulation.

    Urban legends are primarily non-supernatural, secular narratives which are set in the real world. Told as if they happened recently, they focus on ordinary individuals in familiar places, and portray situations which are perceived as important by the narrators and listeners alike, and which they may have experienced, are currently experiencing, or could possibly experience. As such, they describe plausible, mundane, ordinary experiences and events, although often with an unusual twist. This mundaneness gives urban legends a unique quality which sets them apart from other forms of legend. Furthermore, urban legends emerge out of social contexts and interactions, and comment on culturally proscribed behavior. Such tales have been reported world-wide and their proliferation stands as a testament to their relevance in our society today…

  10. 10.

    FOAFTale News No. 2 (June 1986), http://www.folklore.ee/FOAFtale/ftn01_10.pdf, accessed 20 June 2018.

  11. 11.

    FOAFTale News No. 1 (September 1985), http://www.folklore.ee/FOAFtale/ftn01_10.pdf (accessed 20 June 2018). For the proceedings of the first Sheffield conference, see Smith (1984). Even earlier, there had been a one-time conference on urban legends held in 1969, organized by the folklorist Wayland Hand (See Hand 1971). It would take us too far afield to analyze the material covered at the early Sheffield conferences. Proceedings from the first four of these conferences are available in Smith (1984); Bennett et al. (1987); Bennett and Smith (1988, 1989).

  12. 12.

    Our chapter on 9/11 rumors and urban legends provides an excellent example of how a real terrorist attack generated legends that resonated with people’s feelings and their efforts to cope with a complex, dangerous world. The Slenderman legend , which we do not cover except in passing in this book, provides causation in the opposite direction – of a legend leading to real-world actions, what the semiotician Eco (1976) and the folklorists Degh and Vazsonyi (1983) have called ‘ostention’ (https://contemporarylegend.org, accessed 20 June 2018); Eco (1976); Degh and Vazsonyi (1983). For another, earlier example of ostention in the contemporary legend literature, see the discussion of the 1989 Needling Whitey legend in which Black teenagers were reported to have stuck needles into randomly chosen White females on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (Ellis 1989). On ostension more generally, see Fine (1991).

  13. 13.

    FOAF is an acronym created by the folklorist Dale (1978) for Friend of a Friend, as in a friend of a friend told me this story, which is a common provenance for urban legends (Dale 1978).

  14. 14.

    For a more careful analysis, see Hobbs (2010).

  15. 15.

    https://contemporarylegend.org, accessed 20 June 2018.

  16. 16.

    In this chapter, we have been vague about the definition of ‘urban legend ’ or ‘contemporary legend’. Paul Smith, one of the major scholars in this field, attempted in 1995 to define the term and found it a difficult task. He circulated a part of his paper entitled “Defining the Contemporary Legend: Trials and Tribulations” in the ISCLR newsletter to get comment. His description of the definitional characteristics of the contemporary legend ran for many pages. He identified primary characteristics based on narrative status, form, structure, style, dissemination, narrators, context of narration, content, truth, belief, selection, meaning, and function. He concludes: “Having already made several attempts at such definitions, either for students in my classes, as part of my academic writings, or as background material for readers of my popular anthologies, I felt that this task would not take up too much of my time. How wrong I was” (Smith 1999). Also see Smith (2002).

  17. 17.

    Ellis (1991b). Also see Ellis (1991a).

  18. 18.

    FOAFtale News, No. 30 (June 1993), http://www.folklore.ee/FOAFtale/ftn30.pdf accessed 21 June 2018.

  19. 19.

    On the relationship between mass media and contemporary legends, see Degh (1994).

  20. 20.

    https://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/threat-analyses/hoaxes.aspx, accessed 25 June 2018.

  21. 21.

    https://www.symantec.com/security-center/risks/hoaxes

  22. 22.

    See their website paperitis.com.

  23. 23.

    https://www.wataugademocrat.com/news/victims-of-pine-ridge-house-collapse-identified/article_b86464f0-bfdb-58a4-88d1-2075033ee7eb.html

  24. 24.

    http://netsquirrel.com/combatkit/ accessed 25 June 2018.

  25. 25.

    See http://www.thatsnonsense.com/about/ (accessed 11 July 2018) for more details.

  26. 26.

    See for example, VirusBuster’s Hoax page for 29 May 2008 at https://web.archive.org/web/20080529001506/http://www.virusbuster.hu:80/en/viruslab/hoaxes/index

  27. 27.

    For general information about the worm, see Eisenberg et al. (1989); Eugene H. Spafford, The Internet Worm Program, Purdue Technical Report CSD-TR-823, November 29, 1988 (revised December 8, 1988) https://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/tech-reps/823.pdf (accessed 11 December 2018).

  28. 28.

    https://www.first.org/about/history, accessed 31 May 2018; Wikipedia CIAC; https://www.us-cert.gov/about-us

  29. 29.

    FN CIAC Notes 94-04c.

  30. 30.

    All of the material, including the direct quotations about Goodtimes given below are from the 2 December 2000 CIAC webpage entitled “Malicious Code Warnings,” https://web.archive.org/web/20001202032500/http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org:80/HBMalCode.shtml#goodtimes, accessed 11 June 2018.

  31. 31.

    CIAC , “Malicious Code Warnings”.

  32. 32.

    CIAC Notes 95–09.

  33. 33.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20001213145400/http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org:80/HBUrbanMyths.shtml#klingerman, accessed 11 June 2018.

  34. 34.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20080531135314/http:/hoaxbusters.ciac.org:80/

  35. 35.

    For example, see the hypothetical remake of the Strangelove story in a June 9, 2008 posting entitled “Chinese Cybermen Said to be Impurifying our Precious Bodily Fluids: Cyber-Arclight Strikes Eyed as Remedy” (Smith 2008).

  36. 36.

    The other columnists for VMyths were Robert Vibert, Lewis Koch, and someone who wrote under the pseudonym Vea Culpa. Vibert once led the anti-virus team at Sensible Security, the leading Canadian anti-virus organization, and has also worked as a computer security writer and consultant in Europe and Canada and more recently as an author and consultant on Awareness Expression Resolution, a system designed to promote mental and physical healing; he also served as the administrator for the Anti-Virus Information Exchange Network. Lewis Koch is a prize-winning investigative journalist who directed the Urban Journalism Fellowship Program at the University of Chicago in the 1970s and has taught at Columbia University and other colleges. He has covered cyber-issues as a special correspondent for CyberWire Dispatch (Moser 2007; Gosztola 2007).

  37. 37.

    Rosenberger quoted in Goff (1998).

  38. 38.

    We have already discussed in Chap. 2 some of the books and newspaper columns about urban legends , especially the multiple books of Jan Brunvand . We have also discussed in that chapter and earlier in this chapter some of the other syndicated columns that appeared in newspapers and magazines about debunking stories, such as those by the Sones brothers. Another example is the Myths and Legends podcast since 2015 by Jason Weiser, which “re-tell[s] stories from myths, legends, and folklore from all around the world.” (https://www.mythpodcast.com/where-to-start/) There are dozens of other urban legend podcasts. Find a list at https://player.fm/podcasts/Urban-Legends. On comic book urban legends, see https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=comic+book+urban+legends&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

  39. 39.

    “Urban Legends , TV Series”, Wikipedia, accessed 26 June 2018.

  40. 40.

    “MythBusters ”, Wikipedia, accessed 26 June 2018.

  41. 41.

    “Mostly True Stories? : Urban Legends Revealed”, Wikipedia, accessed 26 June 2018.

  42. 42.

    “Beyond Belief : Fact or Fiction”, Wikipedia, accessed 26 June 2018.

  43. 43.

    “Unsolved Mysteries ”, Wikipedia, accessed 26 June 2018.

  44. 44.

    We considered why there may have been so many of these movies in the 1990s and early 2000s, but we did not come to any strong conclusions. As discussed in Chap. 2, urban legends are cautionary tales that appear in times when people are stressed by the dangerous and complex world in which they live. However, these movies had occasionally appeared as early as the 1970s, so it is hard to pin down some particular circumstances that occasioned these films. Film scholar David Bordwell said of these films: the decision to produce these films had nothing to do with public interest or demand, more what producers thought would be interesting or would work, based on their own interest and the fact that they were cheap to produce; these films were mostly B-class movies of interest largely to teenagers, and did not generate large audiences; these films were aimed at the video market and later DVDs, which were more niche markets; these filmed stopped being made when video and DVD markets began to go away, replaced by streaming video; trends changed too, and the film industry is trendy; and there was no grass roots movement or culture demanding these flicks (Private communication to Cortada, November 2018).

  45. 45.

    Since 2001, there has been an increasing reaction in film to the 9/11 terrorist attacks . See, for example, Connolly (2009); Feblowitz (2009); Melnick (2009).

  46. 46.

    Brunvand (2000). The encyclopedia he was discussing is: Brunvand (1996).

  47. 47.

    This is not to be confused with hoaxbusters.ciac.org, profiled earlier. It should also not be confused with HoaxBustersCall.com: Conspiracy or Just Theory?, which is a blog and an Internet radio show available on Stitcher.

  48. 48.

    http://www.hoaxbusters.org accessed 31 May 2018.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    William Aspray

  2. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    James W. Cortada

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Aspray, W., Cortada, J.W. (2019). Debunking as Hobby, Entertainment, Scholarly Pursuit, and Public Service. In: From Urban Legends to Political Fact-Checking. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22952-8_4

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