If Memory Serves (Mandela Effect, Folk Trust, & AI)

We split the party! While Perry is searching for answers to all the inexplicable weird things happening lately, Mason is searching for Digby. Meanwhile, Digby is out to find his place in the world as an artificially-intelligent raccoon - and he just so happens to catch a ride with Andrew Peck. Perry finds something strange in a pre-recorded interview with Andrea Kitta, and as the crew goes their separate ways... it seems that everything is converging on a single familiar location.

In This Episode:

• Andrew Peck does a phenomenal job voice-acting, after Mason wrote him a ton of lines.
• Andrea Kitta covers a ton of ground very quickly, as we talk about several facets of folklore in the modern age.
• The deferral of fact-checking, and the implicit trust within folk groups.
• The impact of AI tools on disinformation, as well as 'information' more broadly.
• The Mandela Effect, and how unreliable memory is.
• Mark Norman makes an acting cameo.

Guests:

• Andrea Kitta: A folklorist with a specialty in medicine, belief, and the supernatural. She is also interested in Internet folklore, narrative, and contemporary (urban) legend. Her current research includes: vaccines, pandemic illness, contagion and contamination, virality, stigmatized diseases, disability, health information on the Internet, and Slender Man. She is a fellow of the American Folklore Society.
• Andrew Peck: A folklorist, media scholar, and ethnographer whose research focuses on how digital media offers new possibilities for persuasion and everyday communication. His current research focuses on how online communities circulate and contest knowledge using memes; and how hoaxes, rumors, and urban legends develop and circulate across networks.

Featuring voice acting from:

• Brooke Jennett of THIRTEEN as Digby
• Mark Norman of The Folklore Podcast as Mark Norman

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