Urban Legends

As we all know an urban legend is a story that is based on what people hear and is often widely circulated as true, even if it’s not. A few examples of urban legends are stories about virus-carrying e-mails, party goers being mistaken as madmen, and men dying from their own farts.

One example of an urban legend is “UPS/FedEx Delivery Failure”. People are receiving virus-carrying e-mails which appear to be from UPS or FedEx. The e-mails appear to be messages informing users about packages that could not be delivered due to incorrect recipient addresses but are actually carrying viruses. This is a real virus. This is a common technique used for luring e-mail users into opening virus-carrying attachments so be careful when opening e-mails like this.

Another example of an urban legend is the story “Chainsaw of Fools”. A chainsaw wielding ‘madman’ turned out to be just a guy who showed up to the wrong house for a Halloween party. As crazy as it may sound, this story is in fact true. Incidents like this have been happening ever since 1992, when a 16-year-old Japanese exchange student was mistakenly killed in Louisiana after he knocked on the wrong door searching for a Halloween party.

One last example of this is the urban legend “Gas Chamber”, which is about a man who died in his sleep. The crazy thing is that it is believed that he died from breathing in the ‘deadly gasses’ from his own farts. If you’re thinking this story is too crazy to be true then your right because it’s not. This urban legend started in August 1996 this story was included in a “Darwin Awards” mailing, marking its first appearance on the internet.

In conclusion there are a lot of crazy stories that are going around and they might not all be completely true. Next time your friends tell you something you should do a little bit of researching before you believe it because it may be just another urban legend.

Media Violence.

Media violence affects different people in different ways. The study of media violence has made me realize how much violence we are really exposed to everyday. Violence is depicted on children’s TV channels and shows. I have also realized that that being exposed to that much violence can really people, especially young children.