“Have you heard it? Have you heard it? There is a hen who has plucked out all her feathers just to please the rooster. She must be freezing to death; that is, if she isn’t dead already.”
As H C Andersen’s fairy tale about the single feather that became a story about five hens after having circulated in the rumour mill in henhouses around town, metaphorically describes the powerful mechanism in spreading stories that wander verbally. Orally told and retold, stories can reach a wide audience in a short time, because they spread with exponential speed. They can also be spread over long distances. The multiplikator formula describe the efficiency of gossip. If one person tells a story to five people, and this is repeated 8 times, the story can reach an audience of 390,000.
Urban legends (wandering stories) are mainly spread through person to person gossip or social media platforms, where there is no fact check. If it is true or not has nothing to say for if an urban legend is spread. A study from MIT states that false stories are 70 % more likely to be retweeted than true stories. It takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people, the study concludes. The researchers tracked roughly 126,000 cascades of stories spreading on Twitter. These were cumulatively tweeted over 4.5 million times by 3 million people, from the years 2006 to 2017.
When propaganda stories becomes everyday speech
The term critical mass describes the amount of a nuclear material needed to feed a self-sustaining chain reaction. It can be used as an analogy to explain how a social movement, innovation, or behaviour can reach a tipping point, where enough people have joined or adopted a narrative to make it self-sustaining and grow rapidly.
Right-wing populism based on xenophobia has a chance of winning terrain when the public begins to tell the story to each other. The right-wing propaganda works and mobilise broad support, when the stories that are spread become folklore. The politicians then no longer needs to push the narratives, as the stories circulates between people.
The sharing of stories between people form a common informal subculture or culture when they become a part of the daily talk between people in informal groups. A “talk of the town”, and in informal social groups, or on social media on the Internet.
Narrowly, the term folklore has traditionally described the oral folk tales of a society. More broadly, the term refers to all informal aspects of a culture – stories, beliefs, traditions, norms, behaviours, language, literature, jokes, music, art, foodways, tools and objects. Folklore can be seen as a common informal pool of information (or misinformation), shared in a group of people.
Mass produced culture and folklore sometimes overlap. But the the main difference between mass produced culture and folklore is that:
- Mass-produced culture, like broadcast and print media and popular culture, is mass distributed, by commercial entities, or for instance by state controlled media.
- Folklore is spread informally among people. What makes a story folklore is the sharing between people.
Stereotypes spread among family and friends
A stereotype is a generalisation that all members in a social category share the same social behaviour:
- Gender: “Men don’t cry. Women are too emotional.”
- Race/Ethnicity: “Black people are athletic. Hispanics are all immigrants.”
- Nationality: “Americans are loud. Germans are always punctual.”
- Profession: “Artists are disorganised. Lawyers are greedy.”
We all participate in informal social groups, like our family, friends, lunch gang, sewing circle, in the pub and in the cafe, football supporters group or religious groups. These groups can function as micro political arenas, where political ideas are shaped, and may be conformed and strengthened when there is no critical voice. The information flow in such informal groups has else no fact check or reality control.
Research on attitudes among young people from East Germany that indicates that the ones having negative stereotypes of immigrants and refugees had verbal communication in informal groups, like friends and family, as their primary information source. This was before the Internet became common. In addition to the physically existing social groups, there are epistemic bubbles and echo chambers that exist mainly on social media platforms on the Internet, see section 3 , section 9, and section 13
In an investigation from the former German Democratic Republic in 1990, it was stated that:
“Informal groups presumably have a higher degree of subjectivity. The tendency to reproduce opinions and moods by oneself, far from any objectivity and reality, entails a great danger of increasing false images and enemy images of the foreigners who live here. This is emphasised by the connection between increasing dissatisfaction with oneself and intolerance on the one hand, and more frequent information in friendship and acquaintance circles about foreigners on the other” (Friedrich/Schubarth 1991).
Mary Diane Cantrell, who has researched on urban legends, suggests in her master thesis that shared urban legends (wandering stories) have a function, tying the social group together: “Legends provide a way for people to bond with one another. Even if a group is made up of people who do not know one another, sharing a story about how a local retailer refuses to support troops or how a local chain restaurant uses subpar ingredients in its dishes can make the group feel like a cohesive bunch. By sharing the outrage that Starbucks will not send coffee to troops in the Middle East, for example, is an easy way for the group to have something in common and to bond over.”
Cantrell describes the way social groups conform around a story so that it develops into an epistemic bubble without external input: “Additionally, human nature may drive a member of the group who either does not believe the story, or does not believe they are hearing the whole story, not to voice disbelief as it could jeopardise their acceptance in the group. At the same time, the person who shared the story has not only created an opportunity for the group to converge, but has also possibly met some emotional needs by making himself feel important for breaking the ice and sharing the tantalising information that others have responded to with strong emotion.”