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Comments
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Subscribe to commentsBluePlateMar 21st 2011 3:39PM
As a folklorist, this makes perfect sense. Urban legends (which is what these stories are) rely on word-of-mouth circulation, not from strangers but from people we know, whose ideas and opinions we trust. Blogs are more like news reports; while the audience is certainly free to reply to and even question the blogger's info, the friend-of-a-friend, personalized communication of email transmission much more closely resembles the face-to-face transmission of oral communication, which urban legends relied on before the Internet. Urban legends were often printed in pre-internet newspapers, too, usually as human interest stories (with no one bothering to check facts), but it has always been the more personal mode of transmission that makes these stories so convincing (and that therefore propagates their continued circulation).