Hoaxes, Urban Legends and Myths
Definition of a hoax: A mischievous trick, especially a made-up story.
There have been hoaxes making the rounds for a very long time. There is evidence of hoaxes as early as 756 AD. More than likely they existed before this date. If you would like to learn more about hoaxes, visit the Museum of Hoaxes.
The Museum of Hoaxes
In the days before modern communication methods, it took a long time before a hoax could get much further than the original source and more than likely most died out before traveling very far. Some hoaxes, however, did manage to spread and were believed for many years before they were investigated and labeled hoaxes.
The Internet has made it possible to spread hoaxes like lightening. All it takes for a hoax to go around the world is for unsuspecting folks to receive an email containing a hoax that sounds serious (virus hoax), plays on sympathies or offers a monetary reward (someone gives you money for every time it is forwarded.) The hoax is forwarded and forwarded to thousands of new unsuspecting folks and the hoax lives on.
There are a lot more sites exposing hoaxes, but you get the idea. If you want more information, just type ‘hoaxes’ into your favorite search engine & see how many sites are offered. Besides deceiving the un-initiated, forwarding these messages take up bandwidth and in some instances have brought email servers to a virtual crawl.
Don’t forward a hoax, check it out before you forward!
Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time
Urban Legends and Myths
Urban legends are slightly different than hoaxes in that where a hoax is intended to make people believe something is true, urban legends are about ‘things that happened to a friend of a friend’ and is definitely true. Not. On the Internet urban legends are circulating almost as much as hoaxes.
About.com gives this definition of urban legends:
Urban legends are popular narratives alleged to be true, transmitted from person to person by oral or written communication (including fax and email). Said stories always involve some combination of outlandish, humiliating, humorous, terrifying, or supernatural events – events which always happened to someone else. For credibility, the teller of an urban legend relies on good storytelling and the citing of an "authoritative" word-of-mouth source (typically "a friend of a friend") rather than verifiable facts. And sometimes, but not always, there's a moral to the story, e.g.: "behave yourself, or bad things will happen."
Urban legends are a type of folklore – the traditions, stories, and beliefs of "the folk" – ordinary people. So, one way to differentiate between urban legends and other types of narratives is by examining where they come from and how they are spread. Legends are rarely traceable to a single source, e.g. a book or a television show – in fact, most often they seem to spring from nowhere. And again, urban legends are primarily spread person-to-person, not through the media or other institutional forms of communication. That's why no two versions of an urban legend are ever exactly alike – there are as many variants of a story as there are tellers.
There are so many of these stories going around it is hard to give name to them all. About.com has a good site for learning about urban legends. If you receive an email telling a tall tale, check it out here.
Snopes Look here for Urban Legends and Hoaxes.
Urban Legends and Folklore
The list goes on & on. You can find more information about urban legends by clicking on the links on the side panel.