Chain Mail’s Evolution

Remember back in the day, when email was the primary way of staying in touch electronically?

There were these rather annoying things known as Chain Mail. They consisted of messages that either prophesied something to required you to forward it everyone you know, or said something about forwarding in order for some company to donate so many cents towards a good cause.

I responded to this problem with threats and making additions to my rather large Spam list (back in the day, I used Yahoo! which was rather prone to more solicitous spam as well).

Then out of the blue came MySpace. Like any living creature, sinister or not, Chain Mail adapted itself to the child predator friendly site in the form of Chain Bulletins.

Following my entrance into high school, I switched to Facebook, the higher form of Myspace, since it seemed to be the “high school” thing to do (peer pressure, guys).

For a while, it seemed as though Chain Mail turned Chain Bulletin would never make the jump to the bright white innocence of Facebook and would gradually become extinct.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. Recently, there have been reports of major breakouts of Chain Notes. Notes were innocent enough in the beginning, as was email and Myspace bulletins. They even had this nifty thing known as tagging, which enabled you to specify relevant friends. However, the tagging ability became its demise as people tagged friends just to bring attention to their notes. Granted, some notes were interesting, but I can’t tell you how pissed I get when I see myself tagged in a note and hurry to read it, only to find it to be a Chain Note, telling me to set my iPod on shuffle and tag 10 friends who might be interested (oh, how bad certain “friends’” judgment are).

But Facebook turned out to be a double, no wait, triple trouble. There are now Chain Groups out there, some formed for some random goal of achieving the Guiness World Record by getting 1,000,000 members. It’s a reasonable objective, but I don’t see why there has to be so many of the same groups (with different exponentially large targets) as to set a Guinness record all on its own. Then there’s the Applications. NO, I don’t care to be a Zombie or a Vampire and I don’t play Starcraft, so stop inviting me!

Update: 2009/03/09

I have no idea that chain mail evolved that fast. There is now a new species known as the Chain pictures. Must be natural selection — people getting bored with the older species. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re extinct, either.

I will admit that it is a bit more entertaining than the older one, but of course, if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be spreading.

And the one I believe is the common ancestor of the different variants of Chain pictures:

Advertisement