Here's an idea.
Pics, or it didn't happen.
The internet, as an entity-- often
misrepresented and taken to be synonymous with the most
vocal communities on it-- desires evidence.
And why wouldn't it?
The internet, as an entity-- often
misrepresented as one continuous psychogeographic landscape-- is
full of garbage, and nonsense, lies, and mistruths.
Don't believe everything you read on the internet.
You want to make a point?
Show me your sources.
Something incredible happened to you?
Pics, or it didn't happen.
I have started feeling this way about my own experiences.
Is it expected that I prove I've had them?
How do I construct that proof?
10 years ago, some knickknacks and a roll film.
But now it is almost certainly an Instagram.
Instagram photos feel like landmarks.
They make things real by making them a networked image.
Sorry, Jean.
This also makes me wonder about family vacation slide
shows of the past.
Were we proving our minivan excursions
to theme parks or monuments as much
as we were celebrating them?
Maybe those two things are in of the same.
Because if there were no pics, did it happen?
I mean, sure.
But how much did it happen?
On the internet-- and to a certain degree within all
of our social relationships-- it's not memories,
or it didn't happen.
Or field recordings, or it didn't happen.
Not sketches, accurate descriptions, and souvenirs,
or it didn't happen.
It's pics, or it didn't happen.
Pics are a principal currency of social truth.
Where there is any doubt, photographic
is the popular evidence par excellence
of something's actual having happened-ness.
The internet, like the rest of our culture, is very visual.
It emphasizes and gives precedence to visual media,
visual material, visual evidence.
And so it comes to pass that pics not only count the most,
but count the most easily as evidence.
There's more understanding about them,
about how to send, receive, and operate upon them.
There are places to put, keep, find and to search for them.
Text is ubiquitous, for sure, but anyone can write anything.
Faking photos means shopping pixels, which is tough.
And if you shop pixels, people can tell.
People have seen many shops in their time.
That's an important aspect of all this too, especially today,
and especially if you're young or young-ish,
an internet user, technologically and/or media
savvy.
You see so much media, so many images.
The social media internet experience
becomes a wash of JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs and-- I don't know,
are bitmaps stills a thing?
Either way in this wash, one begins
to perceive trends, eventualities, relationships,
and all kinds of cross-pollinations,
correspondence, and dialogue between the umpteen hundred
pics we see every day.
Even lacking direct relationships
between the droplets comprising the sea of media
that we peruse, we can-- and I think,
do-- often view it as an interconnected mass,
a large and linked ecosystem of many parts
reacting to and reflecting one another.
The internet isn't a singular mass comprised
of equally weighted bits, but the internet
is a system for creating connections.
And the human brain is as well.
And working in concert, they can do great things
and terrible things.
Forget fun and games.
It's time to get serious.
Which is to say the internet, misrepresented here
as both a specific group of people
and a psychogeographic location, is
great at making monoliths out of morsels, proof
out of providence, taking that which is-- and should remain
unconnected-- and connecting it, turning it into evidence
and using it as a justification for belief.
Most readily we see this in things resembling
what Sam Biddle has called chart brut, an MS Paint looking
aesthetic used to connect images which previously bore little
or no obvious connection.
And here it's probably worth saying
that screenshots turn text sources like Twitter
into images.
The chart brut approach has produced evidence
for several online communities, perhaps
most famously those formed during the Boston bombing.
Biddle describes the approach as simple, unrefined, urgent,
ominous, striving to be informative,
and utterly incomprehensible.
It's also, Biddle fails to mention, very convincing.
Chart brut visualizes connections between images,
even if those connections are coincidental or tenuous.
But that visualization makes those connections
seem incontrovertible.
Chart brut, as an image generation tactic,
moves from pics, or it didn't happen to there are pics,
it must have happened.
It's what you might call a big data mentality
towards evidence gathering.
Gather all of the media or information you can,
put it in a heap, and run some process to see what emerges.
Chart brut treats images and screenshots--
visual and virtual minutia-- as verified data points
to be cross-referenced.
It treats conclusions based on them as proof.
Which is not to say, it's not proof,
just that it's not necessarily proof.
Chart brut is itself an example of the larger set of tendencies
that arise when people are confronted with scary stuff.
Physical harm, widespread sickness,
sociopolitical threats-- it can feel as though these things
revoke our agency.
They make us feel powerless and less powerful.
So we try to explain them, to understand them
because understanding is some form of control.
Generating images, as one specific example,
can prove the machinations of our antagonists.
It helps us comprehend and, in that comprehension,
possibly thwart, but at the very least cope.
Except chart brut and other visual discursive, or habitual,
practices like it don't generate proof so much as coherence.
An air tight bundle of tidbits, which may or may not
have a relationship to fact, but have a seemingly indestructible
relationship to one another.
When communities form around these tidbit bundles,
it becomes sort of like the family slide show, both proof
and celebration.
We've proven what's really going on.
And we celebrate being in control
again by exercising that control.
But there's a big danger here.
One of over confidence.
Absent someone to pop the proof bubble,
in cases where there is no basis in fact,
communities with shared fears can get carried away
and suffer actual mass hysteria.
Like the Salem witch trials or the Boston bomber hunt,
masses convinced of their proof can do more harm than good.
Sometimes that's a literal witch hunt,
and sometimes it's a figurative one.
And sometimes it's the community convincing itself
that they're sick when they're really not.
This is stuff that I don't know much about, but I do know--
Vsauce.
Kevin here.
Does.
Hey, Kevin.
Hi.
I hear you've been thinking a lot about mass hysteria
this week.
A bit.
Take it away.
Mass hysteria happens when a group of people
experience collective panic as a result of a shared experience.
The Salem witch trials, the Red Scare,
fainting overexcited masses of fans
at One Direction concerts-- all examples of mass hysteria.
Mass hysteria is arguably part of human nature.
It's hard to say what causes it, but guesses
include modeling the behavior of peers,
being open to suggestion, or anticipating your own reaction
to certain situations so emphatically it
becomes unavoidable.
No one culture or time period is more
susceptible to mass hysteria, though some research
suggests women are more likely to admit
having been caught up in it.
Source.
The wildest and most commonly researched forms
of mass hysteria are mass sociogenic and mass psychogenic
illness.
The result of these hysteria is not panic,
but symptoms of illness.
Like people reading about certain diseases
and suddenly feeling like they have them.
Studies have confirmed that the media people consume
has a huge influence on them, increasing feelings of anxiety,
which can lead to psychogenic outbreaks.
Think about every time the grocery store
has been emptied because the news reports a blizzard.
It's like that, except after a story on the flu.
You feel a little sniffly.
Maybe there's like a [COUGH] little scratch
at the back of your throat.
Are your sinuses feeling a little congested?
Hey, hey, hey.
Kevin, what are you doing?
Go experiment on Vsauce2.
Leave these folks out of it.
OK, OK, OK.
I'm just saying there are pics like on the internet
or on the news.
Some people may think something has happened, to them even.
Pics aren't even the most interesting contagion anyway.
Want to come hear about the dancing plague?
Do I?
OK.
We'll head over to Vsauce2 to talk about other examples
of mass psychogenic illness.
But in the meantime, what do you guys think?
What role do images play in online mass hysteria?
All right.
Yeah.
Do you think Minions cause mass hysteria?
I think Minions are mass hysteria.
Thanks again to Kevin for stopping by.
And if you haven't already, make sure
you head over Vsauce2 to hear me and him
talk about other examples of a mass psychogenic illness.
And of course while you are there,
subscribe to Vsauce2, which you probably already are.
If you aren't, that is definitely
a thing you should do.
This last weekend, I spent several days
in the woods in northern California with Camp Imgur.
And it was so much fun.
It was great meeting all of you Imgurians.
Thanks to everybody who came up and said
hi, who came to my talk about conspiracy theories, which
is actually kind of companion talk to this episode
of Idea Channel.
So, keep an eye on Twitter because I
am going to post the slides and notes from that talk in case
you want to take a look at it.
And finally, we are taking next week off.
So the next time you see my face on your YouTube,
on Idea Channel, will be not next week,
but the week after that.
It's an episode about "Rick and Morty."
So if you haven't watched "Rick and Morty" yet,
you should do that.
This week's episode is brought to you
by the hard work of these proof generators.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit link
in the dooby doo.
And the "tweet of the week" comes
from @candrande, who asks a very good question
about the placement of the "tweet of the week"
in this very screen.
There are a lot of things that we
have figure out now that we've switched formats a little bit.
This is one of them.