"Fiction, Conspiracy Theories, and Reality"

Over at Assistant Village Idiot.

Your Humble, Faithful Blogster opined the other day on another blog:

I tend to think that all the conspiracy mongering has been engendered by too much fiction. 150 years ago, fiction played almost no role in the life of the average person. Now, with cheap paperback novels, round-the-clock TV, and a new batch of movies out every week, most of us are mightily influenced by fiction, whether we know it or want it.

(I wonder what the psych bloggers might think about my theory.)

The irony here is, I guess, that if anybody had written a novel about Moslem terrorists using airplanes as missiles to attack skyscrapers, it might have been deemed too outlandish. ;-)

The blogger has posted a lengthy response:

.... Story, by its nature, subtly replaces our view of actual events, and affects perception of later events. Story simplifies events for easy storage in memory. It may distill reality or obscure it. There is nothing new about this.

Photographic and audio reproduction are a different matter.

Each advance in photographic and audio technology intensifies plausibility, however. I suspect our very neurology drives this....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 09/12/06 07:37:17 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.