When I see some of the postings on social media, I am glad something like Snopes.Com exists. At times, I am not sure whether I am more surprised by the content of the often outlandish posts–based on ideology or hearsay—that appear on social media, the fact that they are posted by supposedly educated people, the frequency with which they appear, or a combination of each.   Of course the posts come from individuals on both sides of the political spectrum, probably because the patent on serious argument has long since expired.

Apart from posts about the doings of people I know, the outlandish posts I reference remind me of the telephone game (I am unabashedly dating myself to a time when a telephone was a real source of communication) we used to play in class when I was in elementary school. Telephone, sometimes referred to as Chinese Whispers, is fairly simple and is played like this according to memory (verified by the Free Dictionary from which this is taken):

n (functioning as singular)

1. (Games, other than specified) a game in which a message is passed on, in a whisper, by each of a number of people, so that the final version of the message is often radically changed from the original
2. any situation where information is passed on in turn by a number of people, often becoming distorted in the process

For those of you who want a more comprehensive set of rules and procedures, you can check this link:

Telephone Game

I always exasperated my teachers, because when we played telephone, I deliberately changed the word or phrase to ensure that the outcome was wrong. Even if the kid before me had passed to me the correct word or phrase it didn’t matter; I changed it. I tried to be cute because I wasn’t, so I pushed the impossible with humor, trying to get a laugh. I got in trouble instead.

But the game of telephone often reminds me of how we seem to get and process our information on social media. Many posts have context built in, so there is no need to analyze. And since it usually fits a bias, it is accepted as correct without further verification (Never let the facts get in the way of a good story!). This process sounds like the kid next to me when we were playing telephone, who had to take my whispered word/phrase on face value, without any ability to verify it. So I could tell him just about anything and he would have to accept it, passing it along to the next kid in the chain according to the rules of the game.

But the kid next to me was completely reliant on me. We are supposedly not reliant on the posts we receive and share seemingly mindlessly. We have the ability to process, analyze, and then draw some form of conclusion. Do we still use these abilities in this day and age of constant “big” data? Wasn’t analysis an essential by-product of our education?   An NPR article from June, 2016 suggests men under 30 have lost a significant amount of hand strength or grip, compared to men of 1985. Have we weakened our grip on reality?