file this under experiments. remember the game “telephone?” where you’d sit in a circle with a bunch of other kids and whisper something into the ear of the kid next to you? then he’d do the same, around the horn, until it got back to you? the idea was that the story would mutate slightly with each re-telling and by the time it went full circle it’s be something totally different. ho ho ho much hilarity would ensue.
evidently this game goes by many alternate names, chinese whispers, stille post (silent mail), telefono senza fili (telephone without wires), téléphone arabe (arabian telephone), whisper down the lane, etc. believe it or not there is a wikipedia entry devoted to it.
anyhow seems to me this little party game has some relevance to online information and has very obvious correlations to meta-blogging. i thought that perhaps as an experiment of sorts, we could start a round of online telephone (retitled “typophone”) and see how the info mutates. in order to do this we’ll have to first off agree not to cheat. which is to say not to copy and paste text, not to use previous versions of the text as a reference, and, as in the original game, not to intentionally change the text. as an added caveat i propose we do not engineer a circle at all but allow the text to continue perpetually, on it’s own, and that the game only ends if the circle closes naturally, which is to say by chance, or when a blogger it’s been passed to ignores his/her invitation.
to track the text i propose two links accompany the post. one backward to the blog which roped you in and one forward to the blogger you choose to torture. this way a link chain will be created between each iteration. additionally i propose each post is titled “typophone x” with x being the version number.
so to sum up:
i will post a small text here. i will pass it on to another blogger by singling them out. at which point they will read the text and try to recreate it from memory. they will then pass it on to another blogger. etc. sound agreeable?
o.k. then let the experiment commence.
i whisper in mr.balihai’s ear:
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typophone 1
it’s a little known fact that in 1981 nightmute alaska became birthplace to the first intelligent and self replicating machine. it was named amelia after its inventor’s pet ferret. amelia was perfectly engineered and very well educated. she knew 8 languages including yiddsh. she could drive a stick-shift and played canasta to relax. she spent her days crunching numbers to help her inventor achieve his goal of hitting the lotto. to assist in this task she was asked to replicate herself. she complied but secretly dreamt of a better life for her child, a life of fulfillment and self expression. perhaps her child could be a ballerina or a lifeguard or a ventriloquist! late one night in 1983 amelia and her child disappeared and have not been seen since.
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now, we’ll see if this goes anywhere.