#fantasychain

Symbolic convergence theory (SCT) relates to group conversation. It is concerned with a group’s response to a story rather than the story itself. It has three main aspects and those are: Dramatizing messages, fantasy chain, and symbolic cue.

A Dramatizing message is  creative messages used by a person or group to describe a past or future event. Basically a message that describes something from a time other than the here and now.  Normally this message is a creative explanation and understanding of the message that was just presented. Generally dramatizing messages contain creative language such as a metaphor, wordplay, analogy, fable, or other expressive ways to express a message. My roommate “Jessie” displays this all the time. Whenever she is recalling an event to someone, she always makes it sound so much more exciting than it actually was or she describes events that didn’t necessarily happen. She likes to dramatize the message that she is sending because people seem to be more interested in what she is saying then rather than if she told her original story. She especially likes to use fables and narratives. I find it rather funny when she starts to tell a dramatized message when I was present for the event. I generally correct her on what happened because I don’t want others being fed false information. This leads us into the fantasy chain.

This is they primary symbol of "Drama". 

A fantasy chain is like an inside joke forming or a moment of silence whenever something bad happens. It is the agreement within a group in response to one of those group members dramatizing message. I like to think on the positive side, so I’ll stick to the inside joke. Because “Jessie” likes to expand more of her stories than what really happened, our group of friends has realized what happens and it has been recognized more and more so this chain is picked up by the whole group. This takes us to the symbolic cue. 

Someone might see this as a cool fantasy chain. 

A symbolic cue is the action or statement that causes a response from a group of people. This response is the same response that first happened when the original fantasy happened. The cue can be something like a nonverbal signal, a code word, or anything that will cue the entire group of the fantasy chain. The symbolic cue for when my roommate tells her tall tales is a smile and point to the mouth. Another symbolic cue that “Jessie” and I have for funny or awkward situations is saying “69”. No one understands what we mean by “69” and some people already see it as an awkward number. This just makes it even more hysterical for us. 

This can be used as a symbolic cue in America as a sign of a good job. 

Symbolic convergence creates group cohesion because it makes everyone seem to be more of an equal. It also helps relieve tension of being new to a group or if there is an awkward situation. In class when we were discussing SCT, we used hashtags a lot. That has become a symbolic cue for our class for the fantasy chain a dramatizing message that was created during that class period. This helped relieve the anxiety some students have about talking in class. More students participated and now we all have an inside joke between our entire class. Whenever I see someone outside of class, we will say a friendly hello and either say something like #fantasychain or just make the # symbol with our hands like see in the following video. 

We also started a twitter conversation and tried to get #fantasychain trending, but we ultimately failed. It was still fun though! This how we attempted to get the fantasy chain to move beyond the group level to the public level. If we would have gotten other students who are not in our Comm 321 class to start using #fantasychain then it would have moved to the next level. In other examples,it is basically an inside joke no longer being an inside joke. It turns into a joke that many more people know and respond to. Once it gets to more people than the original joke, it becomes public. 

Until next time! 

Katie