Timothy Tangherlini “Witches, Vaccines, Pizzas, and the Politics of Storytelling...“

In the run up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, two scandals were front and center in the American news, social media, and across the internet. “Bridgegate” was based on verifiable events related to the closure of several lanes leading to the George Washington bridge in Ft. Lee, New Jersey. “Pizzagate” was based entirely on an ideologically-driven fiction that was presented through a series of stories told as true, in which high ranking members of the Democratic establishment were alleged to be involved in a child-traficking ring operating out of the basement of a Washington DC pizza parlor. This type of informal, yet ideological, storytelling constitutes a large part of everyday interaction, both in the online and offline worlds. In this work, we propose a three-level generative model of everyday storytelling. This model makes use of the “deep structure” models of earlier studies, yet accommodates the incomplete and noisy storytelling that characterizes most online and face-to-face interactions, by ins