E-mail into the void

By Times staff

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 30, 2000

The search for the Tara Can a small group of e-mail users get a message to a complete stranger even if they have only her first name and a few sketchy biographical details? Our experiment aims to find out.

As we prepared for the "Where's the Tara?" experiment, we decided to try a smaller experiment as a trial run. The focus this time was forwarded messages, the collections of jokes and other trivia that people are forever passing around the Internet.

First we created an e-mail containing 10 amusing (we thought) bloopers from the world of print journalism. We got them from Jim Romenesko's MediaNews, a journalism-oriented site at http://www.poynter.org/medianews/. Here are two examples:

• An ad that once appeared in the South Philadelphia Review encouraged people to call 911 immediately upon detecting the odor of gas: "You can stop a gas leak with your finger."
• The Grand Junction (Colo.) Daily Sentinel ran this tease at the top of the front page: "Central High Senior Has Way With Animals."

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We sent the e-mail to several journalist friends around the world, none of whom had any obvious ties to the Times. One, you might be interested to know, happened to be climbing the mountain K2 and had his laptop with him. (In retrospect, we can't imagine why we thought he would put aside his pitons and bottled oxygen to forward our e-mail.)

To make sure our message actually went somewhere, we sent a few copies to non-journalist friends who are known to have a propensity for forwarding.

We wanted to see how long it would take our message to make its way back to the Times e-mail system. We assumed our journalist friends would forward it to other journalists, who would keep passing it along until -- inevitably (we thought) -- it came back to someone in our own newsroom.

The results would show the incredible speed with which even the most mundane information moves in the Internet era.

We predicted the e-mail would come back anywhere from two hours to a few days after we sent it out. The journalism community is a close one.

So what happened?

Nothing.

Well, not nothing. But not much. A few journalist friends immediately sent back cheery notes thanking us for the chuckle and asking after our health. There was no word from K2. As far as we know, no one forwarded our little list to anyone else, and our experiment pooped out on the launching pad.

We acknowledge the possibility that our e-mail is still out there bouncing among AOL accounts and that it may eventually come back to us. We're not optimistic.

Our conclusions?

• Journalists as a group are crabby iconoclasts, unwilling to get mixed up in anything that might turn out to be a group activity. Actually, we knew this before we started.
• Only a few chipper people actually forward these irritating little lists, and even they're unreliable. Just about everybody else deletes them unread. We should have known this, too.
• Our experiment might make a good item for Jim Romenesko's MediaNews.

- Bill Duryea and Mike Wilson, Times staff writers

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