Faxlore is a sort of

folklore Folklore is shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, rangin ...

humor Humour (Commonwealth English) or humor (American English) is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids in ...

ous texts,

folk poetry Folk poetry (sometimes referred to as ''poetry in action'') is poetry that is part of a society's folklore, usually part of their oral tradition. When sung, folk poetry becomes a folk song. Description Folk poetry in general has several characteri ...

folk art Folk art covers all forms of visual art made in the context of folk culture. Definitions vary, but generally the objects have practical utility of some kind, rather than being exclusively decorative. The makers of folk art are typically tr ...

, and

urban legend An urban legend (sometimes contemporary legend, modern legend, urban myth, or urban tale) is a genre of folklore comprising stories or fallacious claims circulated as true, especially as having happened to a "friend of a friend" or a family m ...

s that are circulated, not by word of mouth, but by fax machine. Xeroxlore or photocopylore is similar material circulated by

photocopying A photocopier (also called copier or copy machine, and formerly Xerox machine, the generic trademark) is a machine that makes copies of documents and other visual images onto paper or plastic film quickly and cheaply. Most modern photocopier ...

; compare

samizdat Samizdat (russian: самиздат, lit=self-publishing, links=no) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the document ...

in Soviet-bloc countries. The first use of the term xeroxlore was in Michael J. Preston's essay "Xerox-lore", 1974. "Photocopylore" is perhaps the most frequently encountered name for the phenomenon now, because of

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from ot ...

concerns involving the

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from St ...

Corporation. The first use of this term came in ''A Dictionary of English Folklore'' by Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud.

Material circulated in faxlore

Some faxlore is relatively harmless.

Cartoon A cartoon is a type of visual art that is typically drawn, frequently animated, in an unrealistic or semi-realistic style. The specific meaning has evolved over time, but the modern usage usually refers to either: an image or series of imag ...

s and jokes often circulate as faxlore, the poor graphic quality becoming worse with each new person who resends the joke to the next recipient. Because faxlore and xeroxlore is the (mis)appropriation of

technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, scien ...

owned by the employer, much humorous faxlore is mildly subversive of the workplace and its values. Like

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

and chain letters, office technology has given new life to various forms of practical jokes,

urban legends An urban legend (sometimes contemporary legend, modern legend, urban myth, or urban tale) is a genre of folklore comprising stories or fallacious claims circulated as true, especially as having happened to a "friend of a friend" or a family ...

, and folklore. The items are often office-related, such as spoof agenda for meetings, spurious descriptions of ridiculous training programs that all staff will allegedly be required to attend, and so on. Names may be whited out and replaced with someone in the office, making it a joke on a particular person, or details may be altered making an item more topical. The semi-traditional lists of reasons "why a cucumber is better than a man" or "why a beer is better than a woman" often circulate as faxlore, as has the well known mock German variations of the "

Blinkenlights Blinkenlights is a neologism for Blinkenlights#Actual blinkenlights, diagnostic lights usually on the front panels on old mainframe computers, minicomputers, many early microcomputers, and modern network hardware. It has been seen as a skeu ...

" poster. Another commonly circulated text contains

ethnic humor An ethnic joke is a remark aiming at humor relating to an ethnic, racial or cultural group, often referring to an ethnic stereotype of the group in question for its punchline. Perceptions of ethnic jokes are ambivalent. Christie Davies gives e ...

; a typical version goes:

Heaven is where the police are British, the lovers French, the mechanics German, the chefs Italian, and it is all organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the lovers Swiss, the mechanics French, the chefs British, and it is all organized by the Italians.

Materials of this sort have existed from the beginnings of duplicating technologies.

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

era

blueprint A blueprint is a reproduction of a technical drawing or engineering drawing using a contact print process on light-sensitive sheets. Introduced by Sir John Herschel in 1842, the process allowed rapid and accurate production of an unlimited number ...

s exist of drawings of female nudes with their body parts labeled as if they were the parts of airplanes. With the widespread adoption of photocopying, amateur duplication of this sort of material became available to a much larger social base. Cartoons and other amateur materials were distributed in the workplace, usually in violation of

managerial Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includes the activities ...

restrictions on the use of office supplies, and often in disregard of

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

law.Preston, 1996 Later, during the early 1990s, the widespread adoption of telecopiers made it possible to duplicate these materials remotely. The use of a fax machine to duplicate these materials also changed the emphases of their subjects; various alarms and urban legends were propagated to distant readers over the telephone lines. This use of fax has been somewhat supplanted by

as that technology became more widely used and embedded in the culture; the sort of urban legends that once circulated by fax are now likely to appear as email hoaxes. Specific computer related alarms are the subject of virus hoaxes; email makes forwarding of texts relatively easy, and the frightening nature of the revelation makes it seem important to pass along, despite any doubts the sender might have.

Faxlore and urban legends

Other sorts of faxlore have had more serious consequences. A number of more notorious urban legends have circulated in faxlore. The notorious " Blue Star

Acid In computer science, ACID ( atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps. In the context of databases, a se ...

hoax A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into pu ...

is one well known example. The "lights out" hoax, which claimed that people who were driving in the dark with their headlights out might be gang members, and that those who flashed their headlights at these drivers might be marked for

murder Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human with malice aforethought. ("The killing of another person without justification or excuse, especially the ...

as part of a

gang A gang is a group or society of associates, friends or members of a family with a defined leadership and internal organization that identifies with or claims control over territory in a community and engages, either individually or collective ...

initiation, was another hoax that was widely circulated as faxlore. The poor graphic quality of the frequently re-sent faxes, which often were made out to appear to have originated with the police department of a distant

city A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ...

, only made these hoaxes seem more credible.

Legal aspects

In the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

, collections of supposedly sinister symbols have been circulated among

school A school is an educational institution designed to provide learning spaces and learning environments for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of formal education, which is sometimes co ...

administrators and

police department The police are a constituted body of persons empowered by a state, with the aim to enforce the law, to ensure the safety, health and possessions of citizens, and to prevent crime and civil disorder. Their lawful powers include arrest ...

s; in the 1980s these symbols were frequently alleged to be " Satanic symbols", and in the 1990s they were alleged to be "gang symbols".

Political Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studi ...

religious Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...

symbols, like the peace symbol, the

Star of David The Star of David (). is a generally recognized symbol of both Jewish identity and Judaism. Its shape is that of a hexagram: the compound of two equilateral triangles. A derivation of the ''seal of Solomon'', which was used for decorative ...

, the

Rosary The Rosary (; la, , in the sense of "crown of roses" or "garland of roses"), also known as the Dominican Rosary, or simply the Rosary, refers to a set of prayers used primarily in the Catholic Church, and to the physical string of knots or ...

, the ankh, or the

pentagram A pentagram (sometimes known as a pentalpha, pentangle, or star pentagon) is a regular five-pointed star polygon, formed from the diagonal line segments of a convex (or simple, or non-self-intersecting) regular pentagon. Drawing a circle arou ...

were mingled with other cryptic or fanciful symbols in these faxed and recirculated sheets, and the entire collection was condemned. On the authority of these anonymous, hard-to-trace, and impossible-to-

cross-examine In law, cross-examination is the interrogation of a witness called by one's opponent. It is preceded by direct examination (in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, South Africa, India and Pakistan known as examination-in-chief) and ...

sources, school administrators sometimes acted to ban the wearing of Stars of David and similar symbols of minority religions. Typically, no compiler or author is given for the collection of symbols, though frightening descriptions are often given about their "secret meaning." A number of

civil liberties Civil liberties are guarantees and freedoms that governments commit not to abridge, either by constitution, legislation, or judicial interpretation, without due process. Though the scope of the term differs between countries, civil liberties ma ...

lawsuit - A lawsuit is a proceeding by a party or parties against another in the civil court of law. The archaic term "suit in law" is found in only a small number of laws still in effect today. The term "lawsuit" is used in reference to a civil act ...

s were filed over actions taken by school administrators who took these anonymous sources seriously. A similar claim that the

Procter & Gamble The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) is an American multinational consumer goods corporation headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, founded in 1837 by William Procter and James Gamble. It specializes in a wide range of personal health/consumer he ...

logo was a " satanic symbol" was linked in the 1980s to the activity of several Amway distributors, Amway being one of Procter & Gamble's competitors; the hoax was spread by fax, photocopier, and later by voice mail and email. Another occasional hoax claims that clothing and memorabilia of various

universities A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United State ...

sports Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators. Sports can, ...

teams are "gang symbols".''Jeglin'', 1993; Roberts et al., 2005

Growing obsolescence

With the rise of the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...

, media such as

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and tri ...

, and social networking sites are now available to quickly and widely spread the sort of material that formerly circulated as faxlore. The hoax warnings of things such as dire and terrible

computer virus A computer virus is a type of computer program that, when executed, replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and inserting its own code. If this replication succeeds, the affected areas are then said to be "infected" with a comput ...

es that still occasionally circulate, carry on one tradition of the bogus cautionary tale that used to circulate as faxlore, now known as '' copypasta'' (an altered compound of common computer functions copy and paste).

References

Citations

Academic sources

* Brunvand, Jan ** ''The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story'' (2000, Univ. Illinois: )collecting examples ** ''The Choking Doberman'' (Norton, 1984; ) ** ''Curses! Broiled Again!'' (Horton, 1989; )collecting examples, inc. "Blue Star Acid" * Dundes, Alan and Pagter, Carl R.: ** ''Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded: Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire''. (Rev. ed., Wayne State Univ. 1992; ) ** ''When You're Up to Your Ass in Alligators... More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire'' (Wayne State Univ. 1997; ) ** ''Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing: Still More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire'' (Wayne State Univ. 1991; ) ** ''Sometimes the Dragon Wins: Yet More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire'' (Syracuse, 1997; ) * Ellis, Bill: ''Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media'' (Univ. Kentucky, 2000; ) * Hatch, Mary Jo; Jones, Michael Owen: "Photocopylore at work: aesthetics, collective creativity and the social construction of organizations", in ''Culture and Organization'', vol. 3, no. 2 (July 1997) * Michael, Nancy. "Censure of a Photocopylore Display." '' Journal of Folklore Research'', vol. 32, no. 2 (May–August 1995). * Preston, Michael J. ** "Traditional Humor from the Fax Machine: 'All of a Kind'", in ''Western Folklore'', vol. 53, no. 2 (April 1994) ** "Xeroxlore", in ''American Folklore: An Encyclopedia'', Jan Brunvand, editor in chief. (Garland, 1996; )

Analysis

* Emery, David:
Trademark of the Beast
', byline June 10, 1998, accessed Nov, 9, 2007The Procter & Gamble logo hoax * Bunch, Michael: "Technology Aided Spread of Terrifying Hoax", ''

San Diego Union-Tribune ''The San Diego Union-Tribune'' is a metropolitan daily newspaper published in San Diego, California, that has run since 1868. Its name derives from a 1992 merger between the two major daily newspapers at the time, ''The San Diego Union'' and ...

'', Oct. 4, 1993"Lights Out" gang initiation legend spreads by fax and copier. * Hofstadter, Douglas: ''

Le Ton beau de Marot ''Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language'' is a 1997 book by Douglas Hofstadter in which he explores the meaning, strengths, failings and beauty of translation. The book is a long and detailed examination of one short translati ...

: In Praise of the Music of Language'' ()contains a linguistic discussion of the ''Blinkenlights'' text

Legal

* ''Chalifoux v. New Caney Independent School District'', 976 F.Supp. 659 (S.D. Tex. 1997)School board rule forbidding wearing of the rosary as a necklace, claimed to be a "gang symbol", struck down by court. * ''Jeglin v. San Jacinto Unified School District'', 827 F.Supp. 1459 (C.D. Cal. 1993){{sndSchool board dress code forbidding the wearing of sports logos, claimed to be "gang symbols", partially struck down by court. * Roberts, Kesler T., Littrell, Elizabeth L., Weber, Gerald R.
Plaintiff's Memorandum of Law in Support of her Motion for Summary Judgment
in ''Tillman v. Gwinnett County School District'', (N.D. Ga., case no. 1:04-CV-01180-BBM). Apr. 9, 2005, accessed Nov. 9, 2007. Brief filed on behalf of the

American Civil Liberties Union The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". T ...

Foundation for Georgia. Shows school administrators relying on anonymous printouts and rumors to condemn, among other things,

University of North Carolina The University of North Carolina is the multi-campus public university system for the state of North Carolina. Overseeing the state's 16 public universities and the NC School of Science and Mathematics, it is commonly referred to as the UNC S ...

logos and clothing, and a patch reading

España , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = '' Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , ...

, as "gang symbols".

External links

Blue Star Acid
at snopes.com.
The "Lights Out" hoax
at snopes.com
"Xeroxlore"
at

everything2.com Everything2 (styled Everything2 or E2 for short) is a collaborative Web-based community consisting of a database of interlinked user-submitted written material. E2 is moderated for quality, but has no formal policy on subject matter. Writing on ...

.
"Mississippi high school bars student's Star of David"
(''Jewish News Weekly'', August 29, 1999)

at textfiles.com Fax Folklore Jokes Spamming Urban legends