In an information-rich society, we have to be careful what we wish for. Remember a time when we had to wait for news to trickle in? I was on a train to Kandy with a group of friends in August 1977. The headline in the Daily News that day was “Brezhnev responds to Carter’s call”. Twenty-five years ago, news was something that had happened the previous day --before the newspaper went to ‘bed’. When the train pulled out of the Fort railway station, there was just no way we could have known that a communal riot had broken out in the Matale district that morning. Real-time information hadn't been invented. Even rumour, the mother-of-all media-channels, didn't have a chance to board that train.

It’s hard to predict how different our lives can be with greater access to information. Consider what happened to Dean Hachem, a Lebanese immigrant to the United States. The Wall Street Journal reported how Mr. Hachem, on September 12th 2001, was busy running a family-owned Arab restaurant on the suburbs of Detroit. He returned to the restaurant after picking up some American flags, only to find his world had changed, thanks to e-mail. Someone, claiming to be the mother-in-law of a doctor, had fired off an email to a friend. In it, she had described a story she had heard from a nurse at a hospital in the area. The nurse had been dining at the restaurant the previous day, and had seen Arabs cheering while watching television coverage of the terrorist attacks. Barely twenty-four hours after this e-mail hit the wires, business at the restaurant plummeted. That awful effect we mischievously call ‘word of mouse’ had set in.

On the other hand, with so much spam today, some things just don’t get the attention we expect. Sharon Watkins’ notorious e-mail took months to circulate. Watkins was a senior Enron executive who wrote a long e-memo to her boss. “We are under too much scrutiny,” she wrote talking about the ‘funny accounting' going on. It only surfaced when the company imploded. Thousands of people lost their life savings as a consequence, because Ken Lay, Enron's CEO, ignored it.

At other times, the content of our inbound e-mail is so ludicrous that we dismiss it instantly. A malicious e-mail circulating last year stated that McDonald's in the USA would give their Saturday income to the Israelis to fight Palestinians' terrorism. McDonald’s denied it.

Those e-mails that move at blazing speed are always rooted in the mythology of the time. Cleverly crafted, they terrify us, anger us or tug at our heartstrings. How many 'stories' did you seriously doubt, but pass on to your network in the last month? The last year? In 1999, an e-mail that made the rounds about Tom Hilfiger, stated that the fashion designer had appeared on the Opra Winfrey show and insulted Asians. It claimed that Tommy had said he wished Asian women would not wear his clothing line because it devalued his brand. This was at the beginning of the anti-globalization movement, when companies were being blasted for inhuman wages, racism and environmental disasters. The Hilfiger urban legend nicely fit. Was there a grain of truth in the story? Nope. Opra hadn't even had Tommy on her show.

So it came as no surprise when a flood of mischievous e-mails followed the World Trade Center attacks last year. You heard the one about a woman whose Afghani boyfriend had warned her to stay off airplanes on September 11th? Most people did. Guess what? It was a hoax. And how about the one about the photographer who unwittingly captured the ‘face of the devil’ in the thick, black cloud of smoke coming out of the twin towers? Aha! That one was true. The freelance photographer who took the pictures uploaded a series of digital pictures to the Associated Press without glancing at the details. (You can see the picture at www.poynter.org/Terrorism/kenny7.htm)  ‘Word of mouse’, as you can see, is hard at work.

Today e-mail hitches a ride on something we all actively seek: news. But when it takes the place of news –or rather, when it outpaces the delivery mechanisms of modern media channels– we believe it at our own peril. People who have played the stock market based on text messages received on a cellphone know what it is to operate without a safety net.

It's easy to get addicted to real-time information. But it arrives without the checks and balances that existed in the twentieth century. SMS, like e-mail, is changing the way we consume news, minus the filters. I’m not against real-time news.  Perhaps a text message on the ‘real’ situation –as opposed to a headline on the prolonged cold war --might have changed the course of events for five of us on that Kandy-bound train. The next morning, we were beaten up by a group of thugs who 'mistook' us for... well, never mind. A broken nose always heals. 'Word of mouse' brings mixed blessings as Tommy Hilfiger, Dean Hachem and Muthiah Muralitharan will tell you. Which reminds me, did you hear the one about how Murali was offered a job by Bill Gates? Neither did I. I just made that up! So please don't e-mail it to everyone in your address book!