I Quit! Sike!
For some, straying away from the truth is second nature. I have learned that I’m not one of those people. While Internet trolls and sensationalists thrive at creating a warped sense of reality, or by not telling the whole truth, I found that I have room for improvement. For IM 310, we were all tasked to create and spread a fake news story to spread awareness regarding fake news. I struggled with this assignment, even though my friend gave me the idea to spread. I quit playing my sport? As if I would ever stop. I found so much difficulty in entertaining the idea that I quit that I knew it was a good fake news story when my friend suggested it.
My method for spreading the fake news story was throughout a social networking site called Snapchat. I decided to use Snapchat because that is the social network site that I engage with the most. Snapchats are all made throughout pictures that can then be edited or have captions added to them.
Using the Snapchat interface, I took an unedited selfie with my friend at the time we came up with the idea. Together with her I came up with the idea for a lie. After adding the bombshell caption “Just quit volleyball…”, my story was ready for posting. I made sure not to specify that I quit my athletic team, as to not invoke negative initial reactions to any teammates who may view this story, or to anyone who may think that my team was the reason why I allegedly quit playing sports. I was convinced that this caption would both satisfy the simple goal of spreading a story that I quit playing collegiate volleyball at Juniata, a fabricated lie. Twenty four hours after posting, Snapchat automatically deletes stories. I made certain to post a screenshot of the assignment on my snapchat story after the original posting was deleted, with a caption explaining that this was a class assignment with a quick acknowledgement of any potential feelings hurt by this story.
Within a few minutes I realized that I did not inform my teammates or sports friends back home that I would be conducting this social experiment. My concerns of accidentally damaging relationships with people connected to a sport that I care about caused me to second guess my post. I stuck with it, and I had a lot of insightful conversations that resulted from the story.
I do not plan to describe, in detail, all of my responses to the story due to the sheer amount of engagement it created. I will, however, go into a couple notable ones. One of my teammates who saw the story immediately responded to me personally questioning my reasoning. Not wanting to upset my relationship with him or the rest of the team, I came clean and explained that it was for a class. The first comment from outside of my teammates which I received was from a friend at a different school. As I played along, she seemed very empathic and supportive. This conversation was indicative of many other similar interactions with my fake news story that ensued after posting. This personal experience leads me to believe that the connections stemming from posting fake stories might satisfy loneliness.
It turns out I’m not the best liar, because after I confessed that this was a fake news story, many of these same friends admitted that it was obvious to them, and that I should stick to being honest. If there’s one very important life lesson from this experiment that I have learned from this, it’s that I have room to improve at fibbing. If there’s ever a next time, maybe I’ll try coming up with a story that is easier to believe.
