In the era of rumors, waiting for the "rumor rumor" has almost become a part of our online life. Today, in order to benefit, the verification of the authenticity of information gradually gives way to the speed of information dissemination. Whether it is a message released by the media or a private statement, every online text is suspected of being a "rumor", like Everything can be "reversed". In the "rumor rumor" and "reversal", we saw that the unknown people and authority were taken down by turns. Yesterday's wise man became today's mediocrity. Those who were nailed to the "pillar of shame" today sang for tomorrow. Heroes are chaotic.
It seems that "rumor making" and "dispelling rumors" are a battle of wisdom and ignorance, justice and evil, but today, it is not difficult to find that many "rumours" are not completely fabricated, and the "rumor makers" are not entirely out of "Unspeakable motive." Before attacking rumors, should we take a step back and consider carefully what rumors are? Should we think about whether the rumors arise simply from the evil and boredom of human nature? Apart from creating panic and anxiety, does "rumor" have other social functions and meanings?
The history of rumors may be as long as that of human language. The "rumor" currently considered poisonous is the product of the "true-false" duality. In this way of thinking, rumors are narrowed down to propositions that can judge authenticity, a fallacy contrary to truth, rather than a medium of communication, a process that includes conflict, confrontation, and discussion. By reorganizing the definition of "rumor", we can see that "rumor" is far more complicated than we know. It is intertwined with people's anxiety and anxiety about major events, the thirst for information, and the official words and power. Rebellious.
Words of confusion:
Information from "falsified" to "unconfirmed"
Rumors have always been active on the world stage, but modern academic research on rumors did not arise until World War II. At that time, the U.S. government, the media, and other opinion leaders believed that the spread of war rumors had seriously affected military morale. In 1942, Life magazine wrote: "Of all the viruses that attacked a country's fragile nerves during the war, the rumors were the most vicious." Although the state urged citizens not to participate in the spread and discussion of rumors, bars and workshops still became A hotbed of rumors.
In June 1942, the Roosevelt government established the Office of Wartime Information (OWI) to combat false news and promote the country's "positive and positive" image in the war. The Rumor Project is one of the many ambitious projects in the office. It aims to educate the public on how to identify false information and encourage universities to set up "rumor clinics." Volunteer scholars and students will study wartime rumors. And the research results are fed back to OWI.
One of the representatives of the rumor control doctrine is Robert Knapp, who heads the Boston Rumor Clinic. He believes that "a rumor is a proposition that refers to current events and is intended to convince people, and is widely spread without official confirmation." Related to current events, unconfirmed, and intended to convince people, it was the research community's rumours at that time. General recognition of characteristics. Two other founders in the field, Gordon Alport and Leo Postman, also believe that the rumors are "connected with current events and are intended to convince people", but "lack of reliable standards of evidence."
Researchers tried to give a seemingly neutral definition, but "unofficially confirmed" and "lack of reliable evidence standards" still revealed people's negative attitudes towards rumors at the time. Apart from negative hints, "unconfirmed" also includes rumors in the category of "true-false" dualism. Rumours of information are either true or false, and "unconfirmed" bans a large amount of information in circles, awaiting the wise man's decision. In the research, Napp and others usually selected dangerous and exaggerated rumors such as "Japanese army dropped a bomb containing plague bacteria in Oregon" as a sample, and concluded that the rumors can only be "false" and eventually went ridiculous. . In order to maintain social stability and guarantee the victory of war, rumors must be contained.
However, French scholar Capferet pointed out an embarrassing fact in Rumors: The Oldest Media in the World: The research of the rumor control school deliberately ignored those rumors that were "proven to be true." Although there are many "false" rumors in life, many rumors have been proved to be true, and most of them are not unfounded. For example, "U.S. government monitoring of citizen privacy" has been circulating as a rumor for many years, and people may feel that it is true, but it cannot be confirmed until Snowden disclosed the "Prism Project" to the media.
Obviously, rumors cannot be directly equated with false information. In recent years, such claims as "unconfirmed" have also been questioned by the academic community. Hu Yong, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University, pointed out that the word "unconfirmed" violates the law of information dissemination. First, in real life, people rarely verify the source and authenticity of a message. If the daily conversation is screened one by one using the rumor definition of Napp, all the information exchanged may become a rumor. Second, the concept of confirmation is often tied to the person who is assumed to be the information we are confirming. No matter how vigilant, how much trust we give to an information always depends on the credibility of the information provider. When receiving information, we usually assume that trusted relatives and friends, professional media, and credible government have We verified the information. This is why once the information is falsified, the credibility of the individual and the organization is damaged, not the information itself.
"Improvisation":
Rumors as a social effort and protest
Earlier studies were biased in the definition of rumors. Research aimed at ensuring the victory of the war focused on the identification of propositions and control of information. The refraction of sociocultural psychology was outside the scope of research. Rumors were regarded as collective social behavior. The side is constantly weakening. Although Alport and Postman et al. Inferred that the spread of rumors was based on group economic income, education, and ethnic groups, they were still reduced to personal subjective behavior in actual communication.
Japanese-American sociologist Hiroshi Shibuya broke these two perceptions of rumors. In his opinion, rumors should be viewed more as a study of social behavior, rather than on the distinction between authenticity and a large number of individual judgments and information management. He advocated rumors as a tool for social groups to solve problems and face uncertainty, and as "improvised news" in "collective transactions."
Alport and Postman have proposed a famous rumor formula:
Rumor = (problematic) importance × (factual) ambiguity
The more important an event is, and the less transparent the event is, the easier it is for rumors to arise. The formula was widely accepted after it was proposed, and Shibuya's rumor research is also based on this formula. The difference is that the doctrine of rumor control tends to treat rumors as a "less rational" form of social activity, while Shibuya believes that the generation and spread of rumors is a response to the vagueness of events, and the process of rumours being continuously constructed This is the process by which "unknown truth" masses strive to find the answer.
To Shibuya, the truth of the rumor message is no longer important. Even if the direction of the construction of the rumor deviates from the truth, it does not mean that its efforts to find the truth are completely lost. At the end of 2002, information about the SARS epidemic was circulating as rumors in online forums. On February 10, 2003, two days before the official announcement of SARS by the Guangdong Provincial Government Information Office, rumors such as "Fatal flu in Guangzhou", "Unknown virus killed overnight" and other rumors were spread in Guangzhou through mobile phone text messages and the Internet. Although these rumors appear in eye-catching and sensational forms, they have a lot of factual basis. More importantly, their appearance is not a deviation from known real information, but a search for unknown events.
On the basis of the above rumor formula, Hu Yong added two conditions for promoting rumors: one is that the group expects the situation to be fully affirmed before taking action; the other is that the situation requires the group to take action as a whole instead of fighting alone. That is to say, in addition to the importance and ambiguity of the incident itself, the number of people involved in the incident, the degree of influence on daily life, and the resistance to the group's collective action are all nourishments for promoting rumors. The breadth and depth of the SARS incident need not be repeated, and the reason why the rumors appeared was closely related to the fact that the epidemic could not be officially recognized at that time and the mainstream media aphasia. Rumors to some extent fill the gaps in information. Although the information it carries is erroneous or even ridiculous, it is a collective social action taken by the group to find out the truth in the face of major public events. As Hu Yong said, rumors are a kind of social protest in this sense, and they challenge the inequality of information resources for those who lack information.
Rumor control:
Disputes over "true-false" dualism
After Shibuya Hiroshi, rumor research broke through the simple “true-false” duality and the field of social psychology, and turned rumors as social behaviors into a wider political, economic, and cultural framework. Although false news exists, rumors as a society's effort to find the truth may also bring more anxiety, but the reality inspiration for us is that before entering the judgment of authenticity, we should step back and first identify what information is needed and can be "Falsified."
However, the long-term derogatory color of the word rumor has made "step back" extremely difficult. Hu Yong believes that in China, the academic field's persecution of rumor research is one of the reasons for this problem. He concluded that most academic papers published in China since the 1980s had a negative attitude towards rumors. Different versions of communication and social psychology textbooks edited by Sha Lianxiang, Zhou Xiaohong, and others also held negative views on rumors. Motivated by motives. The definitions of rumors in these textbooks are similar to those given by American researchers during World War II. The research directions of Shibuya Hiroshi, Capferre, and others have not yet become the mainstream of academics and public opinion.
Capferre's rumor definition further warns of the obstacles facing "step back". In its definition, rumors are "messages that have appeared and circulated in society that have not been officially confirmed by the government or have been rumored by the government." The official opinion is an important criterion for judging whether the information is a rumor, and the authenticity and dissemination of the information are second to none. Capferre wrote in Rumor: The Oldest Media in the World:
"Rumors are both a social phenomenon and a political phenomenon. The concept of an 'official' source is political: the public agrees that this conceptual formula is formed by the official's legal right to all information, even though the official moral It does not necessarily have the same authority. Therefore, rumors are a return of authority. It reveals secrets, makes assumptions, and forces the authorities to speak. At the same time, rumors also dispute the authority's status as the sole authoritative source. Rumors It is an uninvited spontaneous speech. It is often a speech of the opposition: official rumors do not convince it, as if officialness and reliability are not complementary. Rumors question the authorities, and 'who has the right to "Speaking about what's questioned. The information provided by the rumor runs parallel to or even contradicts the official information. The rumor is an anti-power."
Rumors and rumors are no longer simple arguments between true and false or good and evil. At this level, rumors are a rebellion against power, while rumors are a discipline of power. The reason why a rumor becomes a rumor is not that its content is false or even whether the content can be falsified, but whether it can be accepted by the official or other authoritative discourse systems. Therefore, even if the official news is falsified, it is carried out under the positive "correction and correction" banner, and it is rarely called a derogatory "rumor".
In an ideal state, relatives and friends, the media, academic institutions, the government, etc. can be sources of information, and the large amount of information provided by multiple sources can suppress the generation of "false" rumors to a certain extent. However, in special cases, folk sources have diminished, and the government has become the sole credible source of information in the legal sense. On the one hand, in the face of public expectations, the official is either out of irresistible responsibilities or to maintain its own authority, and is tired of stamping "true" or "false" official seals on every message in the middle of the ocean. On the other hand, when the official was unable to parry the super-high-speed information generation and dissemination, rumors as social efforts and protests whistled again, accumulating more uncertain factors, causing a vicious circle.
Rumors arise from anxiety, anxiety, panic, thirst for information and facts, and rebellion against power. Therefore, rumors will always exist in the absence of information and power. Napp has made five suggestions to eliminate rumors: make the public trust unreservedly in all official media and do not demand it; make the public absolutely believe in its leaders and trust the government to solve the crisis to the greatest extent; release as many official as possible Information; eliminate all unknown gaps; effectively arrange people's work and leisure time to avoid private discussions ... If these suggestions are understandable in extraordinary times, then put them in peaceful times and think about them. What about the country?