The Logic of Online ‘Cursed’ Messages
I have long been irritated by messages that I’m sure you’d find in your e-mail inboxes, YM offline messages or friendster/myspace bulletins. Some controversial header would catch your attention: “Yahoo Messenger is Shutting Down”, “Urgent, please read” or as absurd as “Don’t Open”, “My family was massacred”, “Walang Pasok!” or “Crush Kita”, “Goodbye”. You’ll get curious so you’ll open the message and lo and behold, a message strikes fear on you, “Since you opened this message, someone will call you by phone and you’ll die in seven days, unless you repost this” or try “Repost this message quickly and blessings will come to you in 3 days.”
And you wonder why such absurd messages run amok in the internet. So let us analyze this social phenomenon, shall we? The message is obviously designed to attract your attention. Because curiosity is a human thing, and no one can resist opening a message with a header “Do not read”, you open it. To your shock, the message has that FEAR factor. Familiar thoughts would come to mind: “What if this is true?” or “I won’t lose anything naman if I repost this.” Applying a twisted version of Pascal’s Wager, you just say “If this is true and I repost this, nothing will happen to me because I just did what the post told me to do. But if in case this isn’t true, nothing will happen to me as well.”
Well truth be told, Gossip has those same elements with these so-called “Online Doomsayers”.
It’s like saying, “Don’t tell this to anyone ha?” to make the person interested in what you’d say. Then you change your voice modulation, with an eerie ghostly feel to it: “Because you’ve listened to me, you’ll die in seven days.”
Apparently these rumors are rampant among us Filipinos, because we still believe in what we call, ‘chamba’ or ’swerte/malas”. Everything depends on chances. “Malay mo totoo. Wala naman mawawala di ba kung gagawin mo?” That train of thought has the assumption that there’s no telling if this is true. Chances are, these might happen. Wala naman mawawala di ba? I beg to disagree. Something was indeed lost. That is, our will to choose, that capacity to summon our energies to redirect our so-called ‘fate’. Lose that and you’d just end up being a victim of circumstances (in this case, a victim of a measly piece of message) and not a mover in history.
I mean, c’mon… would you even believe a baseless statement?
Would you believe “The Earth is Flat” simply because I said it? Of course not. All the more so, considering the one reposting the message you just received just got tricked by that message. One can logically conclude that the sender of the message is a ‘victim’ of the message that was sent.
So here is my suggestion. If you ever encounter such message again, even if it threatens you by telling you, “If you don’t repost this, something terrible will happen to your family”, don’t believe it. You’re not a victim of ‘what ifs’ and other irrational statements. You have every right not to believe simply because it doesn’t have any basis at all. Don’t be easily convinced and resort to resignation.
Trust me, you’ll save people in your email address book from reading another message that may yet waste their precious time. Just treat it as spam. 
~resplend3nt
That’s also true for SMS and even landline phone calls. TV commercials and shows also pass this message subconsciously. It’s this “believe me or else” or “believe me because there’s nothing wrong in trying my beliefs” that exposes our youth to the ills of modern or postmodern society. Our youth are enduring all this bombardment while their fundamentals, their moral core are raw and are sometimes left for granted. It is unfair but it is the challenge of these times.
I agree with you resplendent. Spare your loved ones the trouble and delete these messages or block them or mark them as spam. Besides, intelligent people don’t hold these messages in high regard. It’s superstition or misplaced faith to them. To humor, no one wants to be looked down upon for sending these baseless messages. So correct, it makes you the “victim” when you resend these again.
It’s up to us to ready those who are younger than us to face these challenges and the culture that promotes the existence of these challenges. We ourselves must be armed and ready for an assault of direct and indirect messages from a secular world gone wrong.
true true absolutes searcher! Although I have some very intelligent friends as well who still believe this sort of thing. I think it’s no longer cultural or intellectual. It goes deeper than that… it’s more on the Filipinos who cower and fear the ‘unknown’. That’s what we get when we see our lives as just coincidences or accidents and not connecting it to the big picture called history.