If you have ever attended a workshop or seminar that focuses on communication, you are familiar with this exercise:
The trainer whispers a bit of information — usually a sentence, maybe two — into the ear of the first person, who turns and relays that information to the next person.
The process is repeated until the last person in the exercise has been given the information. When the exercise has been completed, the trainer asks the last person to tell the group what he or she heard, after which the trainer reveals the original message.
In every case, the two versions are wildly inconsistent. The reasons are many: First, our minds are hard-wired not simply to receive information, but to process it. As we listen, we form opinions about which details are important, which are superfluous. The former are emphasized, often embellished, while the latter tend to be forgotten or minimized. Add to that our natural tendency to apply our own biases, assumptions and interpretations, and it’s easy to see why the story is so badly corrupted even when the subject matter is benign and simple.
Those who study this phenomenon say a story begins to be corrupted almost from the start. By the time it has been told two or three times, the story has been altered significantly. After a few more retelllings, the story is almost unrecognizable when compared to its original version.
Now consider this: As of the first quarter of 2015, Facebook had 1.44 billion subscribers. There are 645,750,00 registered Twitters users and 80 million registered Instagram users. One billion people watch 4 billion daily YouTube video submissions. Stories “go viral.”
Sort of like diseases, we find ourselves stuck in the murky ambiguity between “knowledge is power” and “ignorance is bliss.”
We see examples of this every day. A story emerges, stark and naked. It quickly becomes dressed, adorned and accessorized as it travels like lightning through a night sky. Some are distorted by those with an agenda to promote. Others are the innocent victims of those prone, in an earlier age, to gossip over the back-yard fence.
So, when a 54-year-old black man is found dead from a hanging in Port Gibson in March, the story quickly becomes that of a lynching. Before you know it, activists have descended on the scene, and what begins as little more than one possible theory of how it was that Otis Byrd died becomes accepted fact. Local and state agencies investigate the death, but the reports are so disturbing, so emotionally-tinged, that the U.S. Justice Department, responding to the public outcry, opens its own investigation.
Last week, the investigations were completed. Byrd’s death was ruled a suicide. There was no evidence to support foul play, although by now the story has become so emotionally-charged that even the results of the investigation are being dismissed by some. The family has hired its own investigators. The story didn’t end, a new chapter has been opened. Now, it is a story of both a lynching and a cover-up.
Here in our own community, we see the effects of social media too. A man is cut with a beer bottle, and by the time he has reached the hospital, Social Media has turned the incident into a shooting.
Likewise, a bone is found in Lowndes County, and, through the machinations of social media, the bone belongs to a Vernon, Alabama, woman who has been missing since February, even though investigators have not yet concluded if the bone found was even human. Investigation will determine if the bone is human and, if so, DNA can determine whether or not it belong to the missing woman. But, hey, who has time for that?
Social media waits for no man and no investigation. It speeds recklessly along, without regard to the facts or how people closest to the story may be affected.
Such is the age we live in.
Social Media has greatly expanded our knowledge of what we don’t actually know.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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