the timboucher experience

I don’t have a diagram ready, unfortunately, but I wanted to continue in my series about stories regardless. If you haven’t seen the previous installments, check em out.

1. Part 1: Anatomy of a story-system
2. Part 2: How people relate to stories
3. Part 3: How stories are modified by transmission

Okay, in part three, I talked about how stories are modified both when they are told and when they are received. (1) The teller of the story will create a structure with emphasis and sequence, and pull in different contextual shorthand references. (2) The receiver may not have knowledge of the given context, and will automatically replace elements with whatever they know that matches most closely. (3) The receiver is also likely to identify with certain elements of the story over other ones. They may re-sequence, drop or even add elements which support their personal interpretation of the story.

This is just the way that people naturally communicate, since we aren’t telepathic, and can’t just beam our thoughts, feelings and experiences to one another directly. There is bound to be some degradation of the signal and modification of the story as it is passed from person to person. The greater number of people a story passes through, the less likely it is that the resulting tale will match the original one. This is the phenomenon which is illustrated in the children’s game “telephone” which is also known as “Chinese Whispers”.

Different types of stories suffer more easily from this signal degradation or “telephone” effect. For example, say you tell a friend about an unpleasant shopping experience you had at a particular store. And then they tell somebody else about it. In this instance, it’s not terribly important if they modify the details of the story, because the message contained within is simple: don’t shop there. Example number two: your friend tells you a hilarious story of something that happened to them. While they’re telling it, you can’t stop laughing. Later on, you try to tell another friend the story, but it completely falls flat. Whatever made it funny was lost when you changed the context and the order and emphasis in the re-telling. A third example is when you give somebody directions to get to your house. Imagine they don’t write it down, and then later on try to tell somebody else how to get there. It’s very likely they will miss a key component and never get to your house at all.

In an attempt to combat the “telephone-effect” people have created various systems which are designed to maintain a story more accurately as it is transmitted. The most obvious one is putting the story into a fixed form, written language, a movie, things like that. This allows people to draw directly from the source material, rather than having to memorize and re-tell the story. The story will reach a greater amount of people with minimal modification - the structure will remain consisternt. This basically answers the dilemma described above with giving somebody directions. Of course, texts themselves get copied and modified, but that’s something I’ll address more later. Often, a centralized system of distribution will be set up and enforced as well, to ensure that everyone receives the same version of this story as well. Think about the way the Catholic Church functioned in the Middle Ages, or the way that mainstream media functions right now. They persecute(d) people who try to modify their stories, whether it’s through heresy & the Inquisition or through copyright & file-sharing lawsuits.

Besides efforts to maintain a consistent structure and delivery of a story, the other thing people will do is ensure a consistency of context among audience members. This is one of the main functions of culture, in my opinion. If everyone is well-versed in the same basic story-systems, sets of symbols, and bases of knowledge, then it becomes much easier to tell a story that draws on these, and which everyone will interpret in more or less the same way. This is the area also where people often start talking about things like indoctrination, propaganda and using religion as a social control mechanism. I’ll delve into these topics in more detail also, but essentially, they stem from the desire to create a group of people with a uniform contextual understanding. In this way, stories can be introduced to affect people’s attitudes and behaviors, and there will be a greater consistency and predictability to their reactions.

Next ares which I plan to expand on:

1. Canonical & Apocryphal versions of stories
2. Top-down centralized distribution vs. lateral
3. Inner & outer mysteries
4. Fundamentalism & Brand Identity
5. Intellectual property & heresy

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