For my second link, I chose to link Task 3: Voice to Text to Anne Emberline’s blog post. Her analysis of the voice-to-text appears before the actual activity and so I initially felt like she held similar sentiments and focused on similar aspects of oral vs written storytelling that I did. Then, when I scrolled to read her actual voice-to-text story, she had told her story about her path to take her MET degree which was exactly what my story was about!

Anne describes a telephone game she has been playing with friends where a person records a video of themselves telling a 25-minute story, sends it to another person who must watch it once and the record themselves re-telling the story before passing it on. As we know, the story often ends up completely distorted with details missing and events out of order. We play this game as children and learn the consequences of repeating stories, rumours or “gossip”. However, this type of storytelling has been (and still is in some cases) the foundation of many cultures around the world. I had mentioned in my own blog that these types of stories, passed on through generations, had to be of a specific form and structure to make them memorable. But I think that it is more than just memory that affects the evolution of a story that is re-told orally. What is more important to memory – fact or emotion?

One of the reasons stories change from person to person is because different people will focus on different parts of a story that is told. What you tend to find more interesting and more memorable will depend on many different demographics and experiences. Your age, gender, culture, education, race, where you grew up, who your friends were, what you experienced in your life will all play a role in what you may choose to remember when hearing a story. I read an interesting article by Breithaupt et al which explores what parts of a story increase the accuracy of it when retold in the Telephone game. According to the author’s findings, the preservation of effect, or move the listener emotionally, will increase the stability and accuracy of the story when it is retold, independent of the factual content of the story. In other words, the parts of the story that made people feel emotion were the parts that were remembered the best. They actually suggest that increasing the “surprisingness” (how shocking or surprising a story is) is a strategy to preserve the story in the telephone game. So it seems that when a story starts out as being quite neutral, it tends to become more distorted than when it starts out with a highly surprising narrative. I would be curious to experiment with the game that Anne plays with her friends and change the story type to see different outcomes!

References

Breithaupt, F., Li, B., Liddell, T. M., Schille-Hudson, E. B., & Whaley, S. (2018). Fact vs. affect in the telephone game: All levels of surprise are retold with high accuracy, even independently of facts. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 2210.