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Why we tell each other urban legends
Making sense of the city
People in 19th-century Britain used folk tales to adjust to the experience of city living. Folklore was continually updated. It expressed concerns about urban development, the threat of strangers, and a shrinking sense of community as people no longer knew one another.
In Victorian London, a tale was told about Spring-heeled Jack, a supposedly clawed, fire-breathing ghost that terrorised villages. The figure thrived in rumour. However, no person who had actually 'seen' the ghost could be found.
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Modern urban legends
Urban legends give people a way to focus and personify the anxieties that come from living in a modern city. It also creates a sense of community when sharing these tales.
Modern urban legends mix the normal and the supernatural, changing how we view our surroundings.
Making sense of the city
People in 19th-century Britain used folk tales to adjust to the experience of city living. Folklore was continually updated. It expressed concerns about urban development, the threat of strangers, and a shrinking sense of community as people no longer knew one another.
In Victorian London, a tale was told about Spring-heeled Jack, a supposedly clawed, fire-breathing ghost that terrorised villages. The figure thrived in rumour. However, no person who had actually 'seen' the ghost could be found.
Modern urban tales
- Iris folkloric monsters such as the banshee are still spreading in modern urban living. These stories act as a warning to help police the boundaries between safe and unsafe areas.
- In 21st-century Beijing, the city's night bus has become the focus of frightening stories about encounters with ghosts. Usually, an older, wise figure saves the rider by luring them off the bus, and then promptly disappears. The tale expresses the vulnerability of travelling the city at night.
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Key Ideas
Old Vs New Stories
The stories in pop culture in the last century tend to be moralistic and have a clear demarcation of good and bad.
These stories have virtually the same structure of good guys fighting with...
Colour Vs Black and White
The old folktales didn't have a black-and-white narrative, and instead had nuanced characters with personality, and not necessarily morality.
In many old stories, the protagonist had a varied set of values, which were colorful and diverse.
Complex Vs Simple
The old complex storylines were not having a clear identification of what's good and what's bad. The reader had to figure out the details and the complexity which lead to endless discussions.
The modern tales provide a simplified 'colour by numbers' approach to understanding, with clear outlines as to who is the Hero with all the morals, and who is the bad guy who must be killed.
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Key Ideas
Conspiracy Theories
In the earlier times, conspiracy theories were a convenient way to cover up the inadequacies of the government, and putting a set of helpless people as a scapegoat, cloaking the misdeeds or mismana...
We Love A Good Story
The organic and unpredictable nature of conspiracy theories had led many researchers to investigate the cause of the phenomenon.
- Successful conspiracy theories always tend to invent a great villain, have a backdrop or a backstory, and a morality lesson that can be easily understood by most.
- Great stories are by nature more magnetic and appealing than the truth.
- Human beings think and understand in stories. For thousands of years, fairy tales, legends, anecdotes and mysteries have helped our brains make sense of the world.
Collective Hysteria
Every society has its own, unique anxieties and obsessions, and the conspiracy theories that gain good mileage are the ones that tap into these primal fears.
Example: Many people fear vaccination of the children due to fears that the mass drive to vaccinate such a large population has some ulterior motive, like a mass medical experiment. The dodgy past record of the health care system, and the fact that the vaccination is free of charge, of course, adds fuel to the fire.
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Fantasy and economics
Underlying our fears of robots stealing our jobs are more basic anxieties about money. We're using fantasy to confront fears
Sci-Fi has become a measure to assess what's happen...
Economic metaphors
- The Hunger Games gave us a neo-Depression dystopia where media-obsessed elites torment the starving lower classes.
- The Expanse is about class warfare.
- The 1950 Foundation series was partly about saving the galaxy with sound economic programs.
- The 2012 novel Three Parts Dead, was a mythical reimagining of the 2008 financial crisis. The author, Max Gladstone, said you couldn't tell a story like the financial crisis with realism. You need fantasy to explain it.
The dark side of science fiction
The “dark” kind of science fiction deals with the foundation of economics, which is scarcity. There is a fear that poverty will come faster as automation continues to devalue human labor.
People are experiencing scarcity or are afraid of it on a regular basis. Writers are turning to economists to make their financial worlds more plausible.
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