The Game of Telephone We Never Stopped Playing
Have you ever found yourself in a social group feeling less like yourself and more like a story that is told? It is a much more common experience than it sounds and that creeping sense of objectification is not just in your head. It is the fallout of a hyper-individualistic society, one that has made gossip not just a pastime or way of connecting but a cultural currency. Humans have always gossiped, it is practically one of our oldest survival strategies. However, the rise of mass communication in the 1990s, and later the internet, supercharged it. Cyberbullying and online rumor mills changed the psychological terrain we exist in today, making it easier than ever for groups to strip away someone’s humanity and turn their lived experience into spectacle.
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The key difference I have noticed in my lifetime in terms of how we treat others day to day is a result of living in the age of mass information and lack of social gathering, along with physical interaction. I recently came across the video “self-centredness is NOT "self-care": losing the human face online,”by oliSUNvia in which Olivia Sun covers the very basic understandings of dominant, western individualistic philosophies such as – Hegel's “influential subject object relation”–the perception of self and others and the very ruling factor being the gap between the subject and the object (Me and you). If you want more information on philosophies surrounding anit-politeness culture and losing the human face, you can access the link above.
This philosophical inheritance trickles down into modern culture, where being “honest” is often treated as the highest ethical standard, no matter how it impacts others. If it is your truth, it is seen as valid even if it harms someone else. The problem is that this assumes we hold dominion over others’ experiences, as if our reality is the only “real” one. And that belief that our perception is the ultimate authority is where empathy fails repeatedly in this generation.
It is not necessarily that we should stop confiding in friends, in fact the kicker is that as humans we actually depend on rumors and gossip as a society in order to survive. It is what binds communities together on large scales, regardless of how faulty it can be to socialize on a micro scale. Rumor helps us feel like we have any kind of grip on a chaotic world. Whereas gossip helps us bond, swap intel, and keep each other held accountable or kept in line. Psychologists and sociologists have been obsessed with this level of interaction for decades.
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The problem, of course, is when rumor and gossip stop being just talk and start shaping reality and the existence of others. The most dangerous type of misinformation are the ones that are emotionally motivated, making everyone believe the information without question — the ones that feel so obvious that we never bother to check them. Like that of believing whatever a news channel or your best friend tells you. That’s how we end up with entire communities refusing vaccines, companies imploding because of false buyout chatter, or a celebrity canceled for something they never actually did.
So, what do we do about this large gap in our social realities? Truth is, rumor and gossip are not going anywhere. They’re too baked into how we connect with one another ever since we were kids sitting in a circle playing a game of telephone. So instead, we can practice what I will call “gossip hygiene.” Very simple in its definition–before you pass something on, pause and ask yourself:
Do I actually know this is true, or do I just like the story?
Who benefits from me repeating it or spreading and why?
Am I clarifying something or just adding more noise to the line?
And most importantly, if you find yourself knowing the inner lives of a stranger you have never seen the face of, the reality is that you simply have no perception of your own to define this person. You can even go as far as taking this philosophy to political spheres because understanding the true character of someone takes more work than scrolling through twitter. At the heart of it, it is less about silencing gossip and more about restoring the humanity we lose when we treat other people like headlines. Gossip and rumor easily become weapons when unchecked. The challenge of our era is to resist the temptation to flatten one another into characters in a story we tell ourselves for comfort or relatability. Practicing “gossip hygiene” is not about moral purity; it’s about choosing to keep the human face intact, even when the group chat is blowing up. On account of when we slow down to verify, as we should with every piece of information we come in contact with and imagine the person on the other end of the rumor as a subject and not an object, we begin to rewrite the game of telephone not as a chain of distortion, but as a chain of empathy and understanding.
Strike out,
Selah Eve
Editors: Amia King, Kaya O’Rourke
Saint Augustine
Selah is a content writer for Strike Magazine St. Augustine. Her very name, Selah, meaning "pause and reflect," and Eve, meaning life applies to how she spends her time. She is a very passionate student who loves to travel and meet new people. Check out her instagram: @selah.eve
