What Happens to Me When I Don't Send Out Chain Messages
A null result, drawn at full circle, with a typo in the legend that the archive keeps.
A single-slice pie: one category, the whole circle. The legend’s one word is misspelled in the original and is reproduced as published.
One slice. The whole circle. The legend has a single entry, and it reads absolutely nothing — misspelled.
The null result at full circle
This archive contains several single-slice pie charts and they are not all doing the same thing.
The chart about reasons for downloading music has one slice because the question has exactly one answer, and the answer is a category. The chart about a philosophy degree divides the circle into two identical answers to make a point about effort. This one is different again: the single category is the absence of an outcome.
That is a null result, and reporting a null on a chart drawn to display outcomes is a real rhetorical form, the same one this archive’s map of countries destroyed by a particle collider uses. The circle is full because nothing happened, and the reader has to accept that a completely filled pie can represent zero of something.
What it is answering
A chain message works by attaching a consequence to inaction. Forward this to ten people or something will happen: bad luck, a lost opportunity, an unanswered wish, in the cruder versions a threat.
The mechanism is entirely dependent on the recipient not testing it. Nobody who has ignored one and observed the result forwards the next one. So the genre survives on an unfalsified claim, and what this chart does is state the falsification in the only form that gives it the authority of a measurement.
It is the same structure as the yet on the collider map, inverted. There, an unfalsifiable claim was preserved by a single word. Here, a falsifiable claim is tested and the result is a full circle of nothing.
The misspelling
The legend word is misspelled in the original, and this archive does not edit the images.
That is a policy rather than an oversight. These charts were drawn in a browser by readers, mostly quickly, and the typography, the default palette, the tilt and the occasional spelling error are all part of what the artefact is. Correcting the word would produce a cleaner image and a less accurate record.
The archive holds several charts whose titles contain errors, one about grammatical mistakes misspells a word in its own title, which is either the joke or an accident that improved it. Same principle applies.
Where it travelled
Three sites still link to it, and the strongest is a daily round-up.
The Morning News, a long-running American culture site, linked it in its 1 March 2010 edition, five days after publication, using the chart’s full title as the anchor. That is a chart being picked up by an editorial round-up rather than by a forum, which is the more durable kind of link because the archive page persists.
Fabio.com.ar included it in Links de Viernes #96, describing it in Spanish as a graph showing exactly what happens when you do not forward the chain mails. A French monthly round-up listed the address.
Three languages, one week, for an image containing two words.
What the plate is worth now
Three sites still link to it, the smallest amount of content in this archive: one slice, one label, one spelling error.
The email chain letter has mostly been replaced, the same mechanism now arrives as a message asking you to repost something, and the attached consequence is social rather than supernatural. The chart still answers it. A full circle of nothing is a general-purpose reply to any claim that inaction has consequences, and it does not need updating for the platform.