Pop Rocks and Pastrami Sandwiches
I remember it as if it was yesterday. I was in grade school. It was recess. My friend asked me if I heard the news. “What news?” I said.
“Mikey, the kid from the Life cereal commercials, is dead,” she told me. “He was eating Pop Rocks and drank some soda. His stomach exploded.”
And so, one of the more famous urban lengends, continued to find the life on the playground of a parochial school in South Jersey. I don’t know how my friend got the news. She probably got it the way another friend of mine heard about Mikey — I told him what was passed along to me. There was no Internet, no social networking platform. Just good old word of mouth.
The reason I remembered this story is because yesterday a link to this story came across my Twitter page.
Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter.
I had to chuckle as I read it. Evidently, there’s a rumor circulating that Jared, the pitchman for Subway sandwiches had died. It’s a rumor that had been debunked a while ago.
Of course, this led to some discussion on the Smart People blog posting about the need to fact check, etc. But I think the more interesting discussion is around what appears to be a basic characteristic of the human experience, which is the need to share and gather information with and from one another. Without this desire, social media probably doesn’t work, right? What we’re seeing with Twitter, Plurk, MySpace and Facebook are just new ways, to some degree, to do what happened on the playground at recess. Today, it’s just more high tech, and, hopefully, more accurate and helpful information.
So it seems to me that whether it’s Pop Rock or Pastrami Sandwiches, the need to know and the need to share is something we all have in common.
Peace,
Dave
Tags: communication, jared, pop rocks, Social Media