| > It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time. The cultural recontextualization of stories like this in my lifetime has been one of the most fascinating aspects of our modern world for me. Of course, as I get older, I've seen my own stories and stories about events I participated in get told, re-told, and twisted and exaggerated without absolutely any malice. We also all see how people misrepresent news stories, social policies, and scientific studies (with various degrees of malice). So I think I know almost exactly how the Film of Train anecdote happened. 1. Theater owner starts showing Train film. Stands outside and yells "Come inside and see the wonderous train show. This new 'cinema' is so real that audiences have been reportedly running for the exits in terror!" 2. It's an obvious exaggeration and a joke. Passerbys laugh, but are intrigued nonetheless. 3. Someone writes a newspaper story about the cinema and the train film. Includes the quote as directly attributed to the theater owner. Everyone reading is aware of the context and the situation and the implicit tone, and chuckles appropriately. 4. Story gets picked up in another newspaper but without the context and removes the quote and instead represents it as a factual retelling of what happened. 5. Years later, someone writing a book uses the newspaper as a primary source, and then a cascade of books repeat and propagate the "fact". Perfectly reasonable sequence of events. But here's where things get even more interesting to me. There are *dozens* of similar stories that we've all heard and took as gospel growing up that required one person to stop, ask "Wait, does this really hold up to scrutiny?" and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. I'm talking about the "NASA spent $10M to design a space pen, the russians used a pencil", "Water flushes in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere", and the like. But why did it only happen just now? What prevented people from being more introspective and curious about these subjects 10, 20, 30 years ago? I guess the answer is we needed the Internet to hit a certain critical mass for enough people with sense to be able to reach the rest of us, but I don't know. |
Perhaps we should be asking, what subjects are we failing to be introspective about now, that will fall into this category 10, 20, 30 years in the future?