Remember the Telephone Game?

A group of folks sit in a circle and one person starts a message around the circle by whispering into the ear of one of the people next to them. That person then relays the message to the person on the other side and so on until the message has made it all the way around the circle.

Then the message received by the final person in the circle is compared to the original message and it’s often very, very different.

The game is a good example of how easy it is to misunderstand even the simplest of messages.

I had a similar experience during the holidays.

Inspired by the story in my previous post, I suggested to the party host that we share some of the slideshows that our our phones auto-generated for us from the past year. I thought this was would be a good, low-effort way for us to share with each other what we did the past year and also see our reactions to their B-roll pictures.

At least that’s the message that started the circle.

The message that was received was more like, ‘Seth wants you all to take extra time during the busy time of the year to go through all your photos, pick some and figure out how to upload and share them.’

Some of the signal loss was human error. Some was from technology limitations. It turns out it’s not easy, or obvious, how to share those phone-generated slideshows on a TV so that they just play as we the party goes on like they do on your phone. Or, if there is, it wasn’t apparent to us.

In the end, we had to pick and send the photos we wanted to share. I chose the photos from my auto-generated slide show, but those b-roll images didn’t have the same effect when they weren’t tied to the the topic the phone software had picked (e.g. “Summer 2023”) and the flow of the slideshow.

Others chose the same A-roll photos they had already sent us on their Christmas cards and seemed annoyed that my suggestion had caused them more hassle.

I felt the activity was good and folks enjoyed it as as we sat around and shared some of the back stories behind the photos, but still a few degrees away from the original intent.