Telephone | Weeknotes #440

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Telephone

I found out this week that the information passing parlour game “Chinese Whispers” as it was called when I was growing up (“Telephone” in the USA) isn’t some super old English name for it. It’s a relatively recent term first used in print in 1964! Drawing on racist stereotypes about how Chinese people must all be communists and whispering secrets and speaking in a way that was deliberately confusing to Westerners.

Before that, Victorians called it “Russian Scandal” (1861) and “Russian Gossip” (1880s). An even older 16th-century Italian precursor was the “game of the ear.” Ironically, in China, the game is just called chuánhuà (传话) “passing words.”

Whilst game of the ear is the oldest written name/evidence we have for the existence of the game, it seems to me that the phenomenon of oral transmission mutating from person to person must be tens’s if not hundreds of thousands of years old? Sitting around a campfire and passing a narrative around the group from ear to ear is something we could and would have done for the history of humanity. ‘Gossip’ is a much better metaphor and name than telephone or whispers.

Later on in my wikipedia binge I found this cool PDF from 1945 from the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) a lecture by Gordon W. Allport and Leo J. Postman on The basic psychology of rumour. They say that rumours arise when highly important events are shrouded in ambiguity, a combination that thrives during periods of high societal censorship an shock events like Pearl Harbor.

They classify rumours into three broad categories: “fear,” “hostility,” and “wish”. Each providing a dual psychological function: explaining away personal anxiety and providing people an emotional outlet to vent anger at convenient scapegoats, like minority groups or the government. To understand how rumors distort reality, the authors conducted experiments showing that stories undergo a three-part “embedding process” as they spread: leveling, sharpening, and assimilation. 

• Levelling strips the story of most details to make it concise and easy to remember.
• Sharpening selectively exaggerates a few specific, often emotionally charged details that stand out.
• Assimilation reshapes the remaining facts to fit the listener’s pre-existing cultural stereotypes, prejudices, and expectations.

in the end, the objective truth is completely replaced by a subjective narrative that reflects the group’s collective anxieties and biases, meaning that by the time a rumour has traveled through a chain of people, it is no longer a valid guide for belief or action.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this with regard to the neo-oral, or post-truth condition. The authors of the paper never envision the world we are in today. When fact checking, and verifiable sources of information are themselves subject to the same distrust and ambiguity pressures that cause the rise in rumour/conspiracy etc in the first place. If you can’t rely on external “secure standards” as they call them, instead you have to lean on internal and social safeguards that the authors didn’t fully anticipate or explore but are logically implied in the text. Rumours (conspiracy) are, to use Postman and Allport’s words a “barometer of social strain.”

If you work in media today, you need to understand this: if a meme or rumor goes wildly viral, the rumor itself is the truth about the underlying fear, even if the facts are totally wrong. You cannot fight an emotional rumour with a spreadsheet of facts. You have to address the anxiety behind it. Which is the exact opposite of the institutional fact checking industry like BBC verify are trying to do. Because “Feelings don’t care about facts”.

But institutions face massive pressure to manufacture optimism. If millions of people feel like their country is sliding backward, and an outlet like the BBC refuses to validate that reality, the broadcaster becomes part of the “ambiguity” fueling the conspiracy in the first place. Admitting that we are in deep trouble is dismissed as unpatriotic or “doomerism.”

But we don’t need manufactured hope; we need a return to emotional truth. Which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently with solarpunk. Luckily, emotional truth, rather than fact is exact the sort of thing thing the Arts and Humanities do best.

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Photo 365

Terminal Access

This is pretty cool. The entire catchment of the River Wye has become the first in the UK to be formally granted legal rights as a living ecosystem through a new charter.

While much of the Wye, or Gwy in Welsh, is protected as a special area of conservation, and the rights in the charter are already recognised across existing legislation and regulatory frameworks, the river has suffered near ecological collapse over the past decade.

Campaigners say excess nutrients from the rapid expansion of industrial chicken farming in the river’s catchment area – aggravated by sewage spills – have caused algae, fungus and weed growth that has suffocated the ecosystem.

Reading

I finished reading Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun by Keza MacDonald. It’s a really engaging history, and is told really well with a blend of personal anecdote/history and original interviews/reporting. A whole career’s worth of interivews make the history feel lived though. Highly recommend it!

I started reading Hive by Dan Abnett. It’s an absolutely mammoth two part Warhammer 40k novel. Super cool setting. Feels like he has a story to tell and was exhausted by the wider setting and needed a change in setting.

Castle Rat – The Bestiary (LP)

Now.. I’m a sucker for doom, stoner rock, and psychedelic metal band. Especially if they dress in 70s hammer horror esq costumes and the whole thing is a concept album telling the story of mystical creatures preserved by “The Wizard”.

Commenting on the album, The Rat Queen states: “‘The Bestiary’ is a conceptual book of beasts… containing a collection of mystical creatures from a world forgotten. The last remaining souls of each have been gathered and preserved by ‘The Wizard.’ Cautionary tales of each beast and The Wizard himself are woven through the power of traditional heavy metal song and spell.”

This band RIPS!!

Remember Kids:

“Fault isn’t divided amongst people” “It’s multiplied. Shared.”

– CY Ballard (Unreleased Novel)