If you were reading The Onion, you knew it was a satire. The print version of The Onion was founded in 1988 as a weekly college publication. If you use the Internet as a primary source of information, being able to discern the truth and having the objectivity to question questionable or outlandish claims is critical. Regardless of the reasons, the telephone game teaches us some very important lessons in the Internet age in which things get tweeted and retweeted, autobots draft news articles based on what’s trending, people combine sources of information and draw false conclusions, and occasionally someone intentionally misleads. And sometimes there’s a prankster in the group that intentionally “sabotages” the message.Occasionally the message has some complex element to it that is genuinely misunderstood.Either it’s too long to remember accurately, or the recipient decides to shorten it by paraphrasing, unintentionally leaving out an important part of the message. It may be the length of the message that causes the problem.Sometimes it’s because we’re whispering and the recipient simply didn’t hear it clearly.But rarely does anyone take the time to examine all of the different reasons for the disconnect between the original message and what any one person hears. It’s just a fun game, sometimes used in more serious corporate settings to demonstrate how rumors spread and change as they’re passed from one person to the next. When the message gets to the end, the last person says it out loud, and everyone has a great laugh because it’s changed so much from the start. They whisper to the person next to them and so on down the line. You know the one…the starting player whispers something to the first person. I’m sure you remember the telephone game. The game of telephone – the one we played as children – offers a cautionary analogy into how information we gather online can lead us to faulty insights and poor decisions.
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