Assignment Title: Telephone Transformations
Author: Joseph S. Vuletich, Indiana University Bloomington, jvuleti@iu.edu
Course Motivation: I had several goals in mind when I designed this course. First, I wanted students to engage critically with news – both its content and form. Further, I wanted this engagement to happen in the media ecosystems they surround themselves with rather than some arbitrary, narrower sense of traditional media outlets. In other words, one of the primary goals of the class was for students to ask questions and formulate ideas about how the specific media platforms and genres of communication shape the ways they perceived news content. Second, I also wanted students to gain some preliminary practice composing with the media they encountered. Thus, I designed the course assignments to offer opportunities for multimodal composition so students could experiment with the affordances and constraints of a variety of media beyond word processing. Finally, I wanted students to practice reflective analysis and composition. Throughout the course, and especially in the final unit, students drew connections between their personal beliefs, motivations, and interests and larger cultural patterns in media circulation, modal preferences, and conceptions of truth, falsehood, and many genres in between.
Context of Use: This activity falls during the third unit of a thematic first year composition course with four units. The course focuses on genres of “fake news,” which include satire/parody, hoax, mainstream media, and conspiracy for each unit, respectively. Ultimately, the course takes media literacy as seriously as it takes information literacy, asking students not merely to develop their acuity at differentiating trustworthy from problematic information, but also troubling this distinction by examining how media platforms and technologies shape our perceptions of truth and falsehood. The activity I most want to highlight is the “telephone transformations” on “Day 20.” In it, I ask students to play a traditional game (or two!) of telephone, before getting messier and messier by asking them to change their media for communicating the message. Subsequent rounds might include drawing an image and passing it along, drawing an image on a classmate’s back, or even charades or running the message through different languages in Google Translate. The activity culminates with a multimodal telephone game in which they use different iterations (i.e. whispering, drawing, acting, etc.) to pass on the message within the same round, meaning a message might be translated from sound to image to writing to gesture before making it all the way back. The point here is to focus on the affordances and constraints of different modalities of communication and to think not only about what gets “lost in translation,” but also about the new information that emerges when messages mutate across media.
Instructor Reflection: This activity is low investment, high reward. Setup is relatively minimal, though it can be more involved if instructors want to bring additional materials (e.g. whiteboards and dry erase markers for Pictionary) for other potential telephone transformations. The most important setup involves keeping an eye on time and making sure students are able to move through various versions of this activity. Telephone is a fun game and this version only makes it more wild, so it tends to be one students don’t need much persuading to learn from. But if they get hung up on conveying the “right” message (as is often the goal in traditional telephone), they can miss out on crucial observations about how remediation offers new possibilities for conveying messages beyond merely avoiding degradation. When students engage successfully with this activity, they will not only develop group strategies for encoding and decoding messages through different media, but they will also discuss what the inevitable message transformations reveal. They should, in other words, leave with new ideas about how a message’s movement across media is neither static nor necessarily detrimental, but reflects the sensibilities and perspectival attunements of the various media through which it passes. In adapting this, you may consider whether breaking into smaller groups or working as a whole class will be more beneficial. Also worth considering are social media versions of this activity, in which students pass messages in real time through, for example, email, text, TikTok, Twitter, or Snapchat, so that they get practice with some of the same media platforms they will examine for the major writing assignment of this unit.
