The classics never die.

Sometimes the classics never die. Remember hearing about, when phones were first coming into widespread use, how people were worried that if they spoke with a sick person over the phone they could catch their disease? That somehow germs transmitted themselves over phone lines? I guess it wasn’t a big leap of logic if you didn’t know how a phone worked – you could hear the person, so why couldn’t germs travel with the voice as well.

Well, some classics never die. According to numerous press articles there was a panic in Pakistan and Afghanistan because some prankster sent messages around about a deadly “cell phone virus” that would kill you if you answered the phone when certain numbers were trying to contact you. The rumour spread like wildfire, some people actually went to hospital figuring they had caught the virus, and many religious leaders were fooled as well. Newspapers had to publish statements from the various Telecom companies stating that it was a hoax because the telecoms were receiving hundreds of phone calls from panicked customers.

If this happened in North America or the UK I’d be railing right now about how education needs to be better funded and critical thinking taught in schools before hoaxes like this do real damage. But in countries like Pakistan or Afghanistan where for many a good education is simply a dream and families have greater problems, like finding food, then picking out colleges for their kids, I’m not surprised that many people would be taken in by the hoax. I don’t blame them for not knowing that viruses do not travel through cell phones, nor that it could transmit frequencies that could cause instant-brain injury – how would they know? I just hope that one day things will settle enough that poor people in those countries have access to good education.

Of course, I still want more critical thinking to be taught in the West as well. We may laugh at the cell-phone hoax, but meanwhile Westerners watch Oprah talk about ‘the Secret’, buy the latest New Age self-help book, take homeopathic meds, and wonder what our horoscope is like today. Same difference.