Tales from the grapevine....

How accurate is news we hear from the grapevine? Not very, it seems, yet I strongly suspect that we have grown dependent on it in our daily lives, whether we would like to admit it or not.

Most of us have been conditioned by our environments to accept information first, and ask questions later. Chalk it up I suppose, to our inate sense of curiosity. We just need to know. We pick up the habit early on in school, and we hone it as we move up to high school, then to college, then to work. After a while, whether we like it not, we have gotten used to relying on the grapevine as a source of news and information. And the information we pick up, we unknowingly trade for more information. And so on, and so forth.

Is the grapevine nothing but a source of gossip? Sometimes it can be. Sometimes the grapevine is also full of truths. And sometimes the truths get mixed up in the gossip as well, and we no longer can discern which is which.

The reason why the grapevine can be so unreliable is that our brains are just not really designed to pass on information with a high degree of accuracy. We typically just cut out the bits that matter to us, and discard everything else. The bits we relay to someone else are also subject to subconscious editing by that person, who passes on his or her version, and so on, and so forth. And if you relay that information further enough, it often ends up not bearing any resemblance to the original information at all.

CL, in one of her comments to a previous post, introduced me to a children's game simply called the telephone game. It showcases this defect we have in relaying information. The rules of the game are simple:

As many players as possible line up such that they can whisper to their immediate neighbours but not hear any players further away. The player at the 'beginning' of the line thinks of a phrase (or, in the case of young children, is supplied one by an adult), and whispers it as quietly as possible to her/his neighbour. The neighbour then passes on the message to the next player to the best of his/her ability. The passing continues in this fashion until it reaches the player at the 'end' of the line, who calls out the message s/he received.

If the game has been 'successful', the final message will bear little or no resemblance to the original, due to the cumulative effect of mistakes along the line. Often, however, the message does not reach the end of the line, due to someone accidentally speaking too loudly. Deliberately changing the phrase is often considered cheating, but if the starting phrase is badly picked, there may be disappointingly little natural change.

(Reference: Telephone (game) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

It's ironic how much our brains are hardwired to crave information, yet not hardwired for accuracy. If our computers were this unreliable we would probably end up trashing them.

And yet, the grapevine is a very powerful thing. It can steer perceptions, establish public opinion, create beliefs and convictions. We see this everyday in work and school, in religion and politics, yes, even here in the blogosphere. It is so much a quirk of fate that something we have come to depend on on a lot of things is premised on a trait of humanity which is faulty from the very beginning.

No one wants to be left out of the loop. Even if the loop is flawed in the first place. That's the reason why tabloids and gossip columns are so popular. And probably why some writers and bloggers resort to them in the first place. A controversy, true or not, can be so hard to resist for some.

So what's my point? Hmmm. I don't know. I lost myself somewhere in the middle. At wala lang maisulat. I guess I'm just thinking out aloud. Perhaps you can think about it too, and help me make a point about this as well.