06.28.08 | by Bernie Heidkamp
I posted last week about on the power of rumors in this year’s presidential campaign — about how this old-fashioned tactic has taken on new meaning in the digital age. Two subsequent articles have done a great job of explaining the reasons why and how rumors work.
In a New York Times op-ed, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, experts on how the brain processes memory, discuss how a false rumor — such as that Barack Obama, a Christian, is a Muslim — is very hard to get out of your mind, even after you have been presented with and recognize the truth. Scary stuff:
The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.
This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.
It’s a mind-opening read.
And from another angle, Matthew Mosk of the Washington Post discusses the latest work on political rumors by Danielle Allen at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton (yeah, it’s the free-wheeling genius think tank that was once the research home of Albert Einstein). Allen, an expert in the “the way voters in a democracy gather their information and act on what they learn,” became obsessed with how the rumor of Obama being a Muslim — specifically, the chain e-mail about it that became viral — began and spread.
It’s a great, long piece that includes a video interview with Allen and most usefully, a rumor timeline.
Even in an online world where it’s impossible to find the absolute source of something like a chain e-mail, Allen was able to show how a few conservative activists and websites were able to start and foment the lie.
I have also posted a couple of times recently on the power of Michelle Obama’s amiable personality. Erin Aubry Kaplan of Salon, however, does a much better job of explaining the promise and complications involved in having such an accomplished black woman in such a potentially powerful role.
Kaplan’s analysis — and her personal reflections — break down the subtle stereotypes that motivates the reactions of both individual voters and the culture at large:
Portrayed by the media as extraordinary, Michelle at heart is an ordinary black woman whose life experience and ambiguity about making it in white America resemble those of every other 40ish, middle-class black woman I know. This is wonderful news for us — we finally see an accurate reflection of ourselves in someone who may one day occupy the most exclusive address in the country. But for a good part of the nation, this is exactly the problem. Michelle’s frankness about the ills of America and how they’re connected to race taps into an anxiety about such a story becoming prominent and representing us all. Like so much about the whole Obama phenomenon, this has never happened. The black story has always been marginal by definition; now, suddenly, it isn’t. And Michelle’s is a story that’s much more nuanced and challenging than the hardcore urban tales or middle-class fantasies we’re used to ascribing to all black folk. Michelle’s very presence is forcing the possibility of an enormous paradigm shift we’ve never had to make — that is, from whites at the top assessing blacks in America to blacks at the top assessing America itself. Not exactly flattering, right? Not quite what happened in high school history, right? No wonder people are at a loss.
Not just people, but also the media.
Now, this is something really worth spreading
http://www.poppolitics.com/archives/2008/06/michelle-obama-and-the-power-of-rumorsMore reasons why the smears have to be attacked early and hard.