Why can't we recognize the rabbit hole after 70 years?

By Frank Meeuwsen on 30 September 2011

At the start of my first college on Crossmedia Theory (year 1, period 1) I first delve into some of the older models of mass communication. Just to get some of the basics clear for my students and to make sure they know how to talk about communication in terms of Sender, Receiver and other terms. 

One of the examples I present is the War of the Worlds radioshow from 1938. For those of you not familiar with this show a quick explanation: The radioshow was based on the famous novel by H.G. Wells with the same name and directed by Orson Welles. He wanted to make his broadcast as real as possible, so he simulated a news bulletin, suggesting that an actual invasion of Martians was in progress. Since the actual radioshow “Mercury Theatre on Air” was perceived as show with quality content, people actually thought the invasion was real. There has been some debate on the amount of panic and public outcry after the fake news bulletins, but the fact is that their was some public panic as see on the cover of this New York Times newspaper.

Whenever I tell this story, students start snickering and laughing. How can anyone be this dumb to believe such an obvious fake news bulletin? What they can’t imagine is the fact that such a simulated news bulletin had never been done before. So people tuning into the show didn’t know any better than it to be an actual bulletin.

Fastforward two weeks in my classes and 70 years in media literacy. In 2007, the Swedish Television Company SVT created an interactive drama and alternative reality game called The Truth about Marika. It is one of the most famous interactive (transmedia?) storytelling examples from recent years. In the show, the audience follows the story of a young woman Marika, who disappears from public life and joins a secret society. But truth and fiction begin to blur when a young woman claims that SVT uses her own story in her search for a missing friend. She finds a following in the viewers, who help her to find evidence that SVT is in on the conspiracy on her missing friend. What follows is a five week long adventure in the search for Marika. With the use of geotagging, mobile QR codes, custom webapps for video editing and a lot of talks on various forums, the Swedish public was in on the story. After the last episode, everything became clear and the public found out they were part of an elaborate story, whcih played both in the real world and in the staged world of the television show. I present this case as one of the prime examples of transmedia storytelling. See their showcase on Youtube (7 minutes). 

But I learned one new fact last week that got me thinking. Last week I learned that even after the show, 17% of the public who watched the show thought the story about Marika was real. This gives a whopping 83% of the viewers who knew they were in a alternate reality game but it is this 17% which fascinates me.

We tend to think we are very literate when it comes to media. We think we have seen it all. That’s why we laugh when we hear the story about the 1938 radio broadcast on a martian invasion. But let’s be honest…when 25% of the public doesn’t know they were in a game even after the game ended, what does that teach us?

There will always be a cat and mouse game with the media and the public. In 1938 we didn’t know we were listening to a fake newsbulletin, because it hadn’t been done before. In 2007, we didn’t know we were in an alternate reality game, because it hadn’t been done before in such an elaborate way. Do we know what lies ahead of us? Do we know for sure that the pictures we see on the evening news haven’t been altered or fixed in some way? How can we help ourselves and others to become more media literate and question what we see, hear or read? 

Do we recognize the rabbit hole of a new transmedia experience when we see one? You can even question this blogpost. Do so in the comments!

tagged with: rabbit hole, war of the worlds, transmedia, marika

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