3. Practical and useful content gets shared. If it is something that someone needs to do something better, easier, cheaper, more fun, or more efficiently, it goes viral more often.
Content, therefore, is not always “king” unless it meets the parameters by which it can be shared with larger groups of people, over wider networks. Certainly, our ancient ancestors shared with each other, and through time, with us, what was important to them, whether because they found it useful, it evoked emotion, or made them feel better. Or, they passed down what they were persuaded to by someone who could talk up a good storm full of passion and emotion and reasons why they had the information that counted.
We pass on certain pieces of information, and ignore others we deem not important or fit to spread around. We might even do this because of our brains.
A recent neuroscience study set out to prove why some ideas go viral and others fall by the wayside. What is it, the researchers asked, that makes an idea—which is, remember, information—buzz worthy? In the study, as documented in a Forbes article titled “Your Brain on Buzz: Why Some Ideas Go Viral and Others Go Nowhere” (July 6, 2013), a group of UCLA students were presented with 20 or so ideas for a potential television show while hooked up to an fMRI brain imaging machine. They were asked to pretend they were interns and evaluate the ideas to pitch to TV producers. Another larger group of students were told that they were the TV producers and watched the same videos of potential show ideas as the first group, then make their evaluations of which ideas were best.
The idea was to see any differences in the brains of those “interns” who most effectively pitched the ideas and those who were not as successful in getting the “producers” to buy the ideas. The scans of the brains showed indeed that the interns who enthusiastically pitched and were the most persuasive had significantly more activity in the temporoparietal junction when they chose their favorite ideas than those who were not successful and enthusiastic about their ideas. This difference in activity was labeled the “salesperson effect” and showed that once a “buzz-worthy” idea hits the brain, a sort of “buzz alarm” goes off and tells the person that this particular idea or piece of information is one worth spreading to others.
“Once that happens,” reporter David DiSalvo writes, “the recipient of the idea becomes a better evangelist for its replication, thus increasing the likelihood that the idea will become ‘contagious’ for the next set of brains.” Maybe this is how information not only goes viral, but stands the test of time throughout the course of history, dictating which ideas are passed down to future generations and which ideas are discarded and rejected. If our ancestors had a brain buzz over a certain image, idea, innovation, or invention, it got top priority in their various modes of expression, and managed to survive the passage of time as it was transmitted down the ancestral totem pole to those of us today who are now excavating the information in story, song, art, symbol, and structure.
The only thing that has changed through time is the amount of opportunities we have to go viral, with today’s technology, via texting, e-mailing, social networking, radio shows, television, motion pictures, books, magazines, and so forth. But the reasons some ideas survive may always be a part of human nature that doesn’t change over time. Get them in the gut.
Other elements have been identified that pinpoint why certain videos go viral over such sites as Facebook and YouTube. Surprise is a big one. If you can surprise people with images or content, they tend to remember it longer and desire to tell someone else about it, in hopes of getting that same surprise response. Even the intensity of the message counts, because we all respond more to people who are telling us something with passion behind it. Relevance and importance always count, as everyone wants to be the purveyor of news, bad or good. Notice how fast news headlines spread over social networking?
Today, everyone watches video clips, and many people even live by them, learning new skills, laughing over funny scenes, and getting personal insight into other people’s lives. Unfortunately, too many people look to YouTube videos as their news sources or for “truth,” only to be met by just as much, if not more, shaky and un-sourced information as that our mass media presents.
Bad Information
Misinformation, which is just false information that gets spread by accident or lack of oversight, is everywhere. People take something that has not been sourced or proven true, and they spread it, and nobody along the way takes the time to check into the validity, until someone does finally question the viral wave and stop it in its tracks by looking for the real story. At the same time, we are being exposed to everything from disinformation, which is the purposeful spread of false information often by authority figures, to propaganda from our government, the media, and corporations that want us to think and believe one thing over another for their own motives and agendas. Though talk of conspiracies always leads to many a rolled eye, the thing is, we are not being given all the information all of the time, and we end up passing down to future generations only what we have been told.
But is it true?
“Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels. A propaganda organization employs propagandists who engage in propagandism—the applied creation and distribution of such forms of persuasion.”
—Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States, 1996
We authors talked with Ron Patton, publisher of Paranoia Magazine and producer of the ParanoiaCon Conference about how what we hear isn’t always the truth—or close.
How is disinformation used today to influence what information goes viral?
RP: Disinformation, which is the intentional method of disseminating false or inaccurate information, is used primarily via the Internet and media. Since the populace is so enraptured with social networking, it’s becomes a viable outlet for spinning such propaganda. The objective is to create spurious theories that appear cogent and believable, but are in fact, unverifiable. Congruently, misinformation is a derivative of disinformation, whereby the tainted data is unintentionally spread by unwitting secondary parties.
During the great world wars, propaganda played a huge role in swaying the populace against the enemy. What role is propaganda playing today in our lives? Who is perpetuating it?
RP: Propaganda is used exponentially, congruent to such technologies as television, computers, cell phones, etc. There’s a greater capacity to manipulate the minds of the masses with “information overload.” Too much information may cause confusion or desensitization. Again, the mainstream media are the major culprits employing such methodologies. This began systematically, with Operation Mockingbird. This was the CIA campaign beginning in the 1950s, to influence the media by strategically placing agents within the major news networks. The major objectives are: 1) to create fear and induce panic, thereby immobilizing a susceptible public; 2) utilize ad hominem attacks, by unjustly challenging the credibility of a person, organization or movement; and 3) altering historical facts by slightly altering or fabricating factual historical information. “Containment” is also used by intentionally withholding important facts with regard to a particular issue.
What is twilight language and how does it influence ideas and information presented to the public? An example of a recent event utilizing this?
RP: The Twilight Language is derived from Tantric origins; meaning, “secret language.” It was regarded as an esoteric tradition of initiation. Conspiracy researcher and author James Shelby Downard expanded the concept in a contemporary perspective, by examining hidden meanings and synchromystic connections via onomatology (study of names), toponymy (study of places) and numerology (study of numbers). Downard regarded it as, “the science
of symbolism.” Loren Coleman, author of the book The Copycat Effect, has meticulously analyzed the recent traumatic events, such as the Aurora and Sandy Hook mass shootings. He also made some startling connections regarding the Boston Marathon bombing. The most glaring was the date—April 19. He states: “This is a time of high violence dates of April 19 (Waco and Oklahoma City bombing anniversaries) and April 20 (Hitler’s birthday and Columbine). April 19th is the anniversary of the deaths occurring at the end of the Waco events and the Oklahoma City bombing. It is an older anniversary of the Revolutionary War, of militia deaths, and past school violence incidents.”
When it comes to viral information today, how do cognitive dissonance and Hegelian dialectics fit into shaping public perception?
RP: Hegelian dialectics is comprised of a three-stage development: a thesis, giving rise to its reaction, an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis, and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis. Modern day conspiracy theorists David Icke and Alex Jones have simplified the model by referring to it as “Problem- Reaction-Solution.” Cognitive dissonance is a denial mechanism when an idea or belief conflicts with our paradigm or worldview. This is readily evidenced within our two party political system—Republicans and Democrats. Although they contrast, ideologically, the outcome regarding critical policies are essentially the same, with the minor exceptions. Since most people think in a linear fashion, this “smoke-and-mirrors” methodology is ideal from keeping those peripherally impaired from thinking “outside the box.”
Conspiracies are often based upon truth, just as smoke often means a fire is present. How do we learn to find the truth in the conspiracy theory?
RP: First of all, most people need to understand the meaning of conspiracy, which is basically a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. This has occurred incessantly from the beginning of human existence, and, within all parts of society: religion, politics, business, and families. Once we become more adept in looking at the “big picture” while incorporating deductive and inductive reasoning, we overcome incredulity and semantics, thus, make better sense of the complexities inherent within the array of conspiracies.
Rumor Has It...
So, could the ancients have been victims of the same? Could they have passed on to us their own misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, which we now take as truth and as valid parts of our historical past? The truth is, selective information will always be a challenge for those who wish to understand the past, just as one day people will wonder what our lives were life and what was important to us based upon the information they have available. We all know the power of rumor and gossip. In A Psychology of Rumor, written in 1944, author Robert Knapp analyzed more than one thousand rumors spread during World War II that were originally printed in the Boston Herald’s “Rumor Clinic” column. Knapp defines rumor as:
A proposition for belief of topical reference disseminated without official verification.... So formidably defined, rumor is but a special case of informal social communications, including myth, legend, and current humor. From myth and legend it is distinguished by its emphasis on the topical. Where humor is designed to provoke laughter, rumor begs for belief.
His analysis suggested three categories of rumors (along with our own version of what that might look like today):
1. Pipe dream rumors reflect public desires and wished-for outcomes (e.g., Japan’s oil reserves were low and thus World War II would soon end). Today’s version would be rumors of terrorism finally being over because all members of Al-Qaeda had been killed.
2. Bogie or fear rumors reflect feared outcomes (e.g., an enemy surprise attack is imminent). Today’s version would be the media stating that gas station lines were imminent because of a fire at a refinery.
3. Wedge-driving rumors intend to undermine group loyalty or interpersonal relations (e.g., American Catholics were seeking to avoid the draft). Today’s version would be the media suggesting people stay out of cities for fear of race riots after a racially charged court case verdict is read.
Knapp discovered that negative rumors were more likely to go viral than positive rumors—which, remember, is the opposite of viral contagion of ideas, which are usually more prone to go viral if they are positive. However, keep in mind that if negative rumors incite fear, they will pack far more emotional punch. Today’s rumor mill often involves celebrities, athletes, and politicians and their wrongdoings, which the public seems to salivate over, as well as racially and ethnically charged news items that might incite violence or angry reactions. During a presidential or congressional election, rumors fly on all sides, leaving the confused public picking out what they think is right and true from a sea of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda to boot.
Remember memes from Chapter 1? Richard Brodie said in Virus of the Mind that “When you sell people a bunch of memes, it can program them to spend the rest of their lives behaving the way you want them to.” Recall the old saying, that there are three sides to every story: yours, theirs, and the truth.
Back in 1938, with only radio as a means of transmission, a story mistaken for fact—a rumor, if you will—caused widespread chaos and disorder. Imagine what can happen today with the modes of communication we are privy to. We saw some of that possibility in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but since then, social networking has exploded, and an event of that magnitude today could literally cause a global panic unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. Again, we got a taste of that in the days before December 21, 2012, the alleged end of the world/Mayan Calendar. Nothing happened—but if it did, we can only guess at how the information going viral would have changed the world, even if most of it was based on nothing more than assumption, rumor, fear, and hysteria.
Maybe another question to ask is: What are we, right now, creating that will one day become the viral mythology of our times?
There are two main categories of information we are creating today that will be passed on to our offspring:
1. Personal. We leave behind our personal lives in the form of letters, sticky notes, e-mails, texts, stories (oral and written), posts, and pictures on our social networking sites, our clothing, books, music, hobbies, the homes we lived in, our furnishings and art, our body art such as piercings and tattoos and makeup, our creative endeavors whether writing or painting or knitting, our genetics via physical and behavioral traits we pass on to our children, our cars and modes of transport, the food and drinks we consumed, the technology we used, and things we purchased for fun or practical use, including books, DVDs, toys, games, home décor, gardening, and pet care—and even the trash we accumulated and left.
2. Collective. We as a people leave news headlines and stories, social networking sites, trends and fads, cartoons and comic books, and television shows, movies, and books we loved and preferred enough to make blockbusters or bestsellers, our neighborhoods, our parks, our beaches and natural settings, our restaurants and libraries and architecture, our music celebrations and festivals, our art shows and museums and playhouses and strip clubs and casinos, our guns and our flags and our peace signs and protest signs, our rock stars and media stars, and the people we worshipped and made celebrities, our churches and mosques and temples and pagan circles, our airports and train stations and subways and space station.
You get the picture. Everything we engage in as a society, as human beings, locally or globally, gets embedded and encoded as pieces of our historical puzzle for someone to put together one day. All of it is information, from whom we elected president to which nations went to war to who hosted our Olympic games, what laundry detergent brand we favored in 2011, and what we chose as our favorite reality show on TV in 2013. It all counts and will one day all be accounted for.
We still don’t quite know why the pyramids were built, or by whom, or who killed John F. Kennedy, or whether or not the government knew about UFOs back in 1947 or do now. Some clues will evade us no matter how hard we di
g for them, or evade us so long that we die before we get enough information to answer a particular burning question. Not every piece of information survives the trip over time—and of the its and bits that do, it isn’t all necessarily going to make sense to a culture that has no real reference points to work with, other than those that come from educated guesses and putting together a partial puzzle with what pieces we do have.
Future Excavations
Say, for example, a thousand years from now, students excavating at a site in what to us was New York City come across five things: a stash of pornographic magazines, a cache of Kit Kat wrappers, a Tool T-shirt, a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, and a souvenir eye patch from a pirate ride at a local amusement park. With those items, which by then will be considered artifacts, the students must create a scenario that connects the dots, and offers a bigger and more complete vision of “a guy from New York City in the 21st century.” Yet how much information is missing? If they also dig up his computer or cell phone and can somehow figure out how to retrieve his texts and e-mails, they will get a better and more rounded view of who he was; and if they happen to find remains of his tiny apartment, the one he paid through the nose for to live in the Big Apple, along with some of his clothing and furnishings, those students may be able to draw a decent conclusion as to what he was like and the kind of life he led.
But still, so much will be missing.
That’s the problem we face when trying to find, and then interpret, the ideas and information of the ancients: So much is still missing. We study and research and make very educated guesses and often we actually nail it pretty close, but still, so much is missing.
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