Bonsai Kittens
Yesterday, I received a strange email from a friend. It was a petition demanding the end to "bonsai kitten" - a pasttime in which a person stuffs a live kitten into a small glass jar for a year with the hope of creating a shrunken and distorted "bonsia" cat. My friend had received the email about bonsai kitten from another friend, and because she has a good social conscience, immediately forwarded it to everybody she knew. Sound familiar?
Well it gets better. The email also had a link to a website (www.bonsaikittens.com) which shows photos of the distorted cats and information on how to bonsai your own cat. The site then goes on to describe techniques for packing your kitten into a tiny container, how to feed your cat and techniques for removing waste.
If you haven’t guessed already, the site is a fake and the email my friend sent me was nothing more than a funny (although disturbing) example of a media virus. Like a computer virus, a media virus spreads from computer to computer, usually by email. But unlike a computer virus, a media virus doesn’t take advantage of a computer’s weakness to spread, instead it exploits a uniquely human weaknesses, gullability.
