I'm going to ignore the 9/11 panic part (I'm sure you can read much better blogs than mine on that topic) and instead address the issue that is more interesting to me as a writer: the way that people tend to unconsciously absorb as "fact" things they've seen in fiction.
The Making Light blog post makes the point that real life terrorists don't use photography. Maybe they should but, historically, they just don't. However, photo reconnaissance is a big part of many movies dealing with terrorism. When people see memorable fiction that shows something a certain way, they tend to believe it, especially if they see the same thing in many different items of fiction.
This phenomenon is more than just the suspension of disbelief, which is a kind of temporary immersion in a fictional world, where you allow yourself to forget that there never was any such person as Huck Finn or Sherlock Holmes, that Narnia doesn't exist, and that radiation causes illness, not superpowers. Suspension of disbelief doesn't affect your real beliefs. It is merely a variety of the game of "pretend" we all played as children. You know the truth all along.
I don't think the phenomenon of actually believing things from fiction has a name yet, but it is obviously something far beyond the suspension of disbelief. Perhaps a good name would be the "shelving of disbelief" since in this case the disbelief isn't just suspended for a time but is permanently done away with ("shelving" is also personally appealing because it could seem to refer to bookshelves too, thus reinforcing the wordplay).
I actually had direct exposure to the "shelving of disbelief" a few weeks ago, while talking with a group of friends in my college's cafeteria. One guy spent most of the lunch discussing a paper he'd written that his professor hadn't received very well. The premise of the paper was that none of the women from the era of World War II were able to even slightly understand the shell shock experienced by male family members. As a premise, it's a bit iffy. One could easily argue that some women did understand, because some served directly themselves, plus there were plenty of instances of shell shock among female nurses who tended WWII wounded. Also, you don't necessarily need to experience something directly yourself in order to have empathy for others who suffer it. However, I'm getting a bit off track here. The real problem was that the student used a short story as his source. Yes, after reading a deeply moving short story on the topic, he became fully convinced that women living during WWII could never understand the pain of male soldiers, and he also felt that his professor should feel the same way. Never mind that fiction is never a proper source for nonfiction (unless you're writing literary criticism or descriptions and cataloging of fiction, which he was not). This student was so deeply affected by this short story that he felt it must be communicating a truth. In short, he shelved his disbelief. Fiction, rather than nonfiction, shaped a conviction he now holds about how the world works.
You might think you'd never do the same. But the phenomenon is perhaps far more common than you may think, and great masses of people have proven to be quite susceptible. In fact, with certain topics, it is the norm that fiction shapes society's beliefs instead of nonfiction. This is most common with topics where the average person wouldn't have any direct experience. For example, you probably believe that dogs can't see color, that their vision looks exactly like a black-and-white TV. You've surely seen a black-and-white doggy cam on countless shows and movies, so it must be true, right? Well, dogs can see color, particularly blues and yellows, they just don't see color as well as humans. There's a world of difference between true doggy vision and the stereotypical doggy cam of television and movies.
Another topic nobody has had any direct experience with is black holes. In order to develop your personal concept of what a black hole is and how it works, you can read a nonfiction book that lays out the facts and theories for you, or you can just absorb the concept of a black hole that already exists in popular culture. Most people do the latter. Is it good to absorb the pop culture concept? The answer varies according to whether the novelists and script writers you're depending on have done a proper amount of research. If they have, then the concept of a black hole that you get from fiction won't be much different than if you'd actually consulted the nonfiction books yourself. However, if they did not do the research, then you're quite likely to end up with an idiotic concept in your head unless you do the research yourself.
Anything that ordinary people are unlikely to have direct experience with is highly vulnerable to this phenomenon, such as how special ops really work, or what exotic chemicals or radioactive substances actually look like or what a great horned owl actually sounds like. Things that are common enough, but that people might not pay close attention to, are also quite vulnerable to misrepresentation. For example there is a convention in movies that lightning and thunder occur at the same moment (they actually occur seconds apart unless the lightning is striking you or striking right next to you).
Once an idea gets well-established in the realm of fiction, it gathers a kind of momentum and force to itself even if it's wrong and only a slight amount of research will show the truth. It might be wrong because writers didn't do the research to begin with and nobody since has bothered to correct it. It might be wrong because when the idea became established in fiction it was considered correct, and even though it's now discredited writers haven't been able to dislodge the earlier wrong idea in favor of today's better theory. Some ideas have dominated fiction for so long that writers are apprehensive about trying to subvert them. Readers may rebel against the truth because they "know" things aren't really like that, even though the writer did the work and got the research right. Even worse, the writer may feel the need to indulge in cramming the research down the throats of the readers in order to cut off a reader rebellion before it starts. This can work but, like all varieties of info-dumping, it can often derail the storyline and bore the heck out of readers.
The "shelving of disbelief" actually covers an extremely wide variety of beliefs, both those dealing with fantastic topics and the mundane. One of the oddest examples of shelving your disbelief, and yet also so common we've probably all seen it on Hollywood biography shows, is the situation where people have so many experiences watching a character that they have trouble believing that character isn't real in some way. For example, the "shelving of disbelief" is responsible for the way that actor Todd Bridges keeps getting confronted by people who have trouble believing his real name isn't "Willis." The shelving of disbelief also covers a particularly wide variety of topics involving guns. Most people get the bulk of their gun knowledge from fiction, which can lead to quite a bit of hilarity. There are surprisingly large numbers of people who will vehemently defend both the idea that getting hit by a bullet will knock you a good distance backwards (even though it violates Newton's laws rather obviously) and the idea that you can shoot out a lock (even though real-world tests prove that only very powerful guns can, and that any gun capable of doing this creates such incredibly dangerous shrapnel from the shattered lock that you're better off kicking down the door or shooting a hole through the door itself instead).
The "shelving of disbelief" also affects people's personal beliefs about things outside the realm of science. I know that the topic of people's beliefs about religion, the supernatural and the various phenomena and creatures that have been rejected by science is a sensitive and personal topic, so before I launch into a more extended discussion I want to say that I don't intend any offense to my readers. However, depending on what your own convictions are, I might piss you off. If you've been deeply upset in the past by people questioning your spiritual beliefs or putting an unusual spin on them, you might want to stop reading at this point.
Many devout Christians (unknowingly) get their ideas about hell more from a very famous fourteenth century piece of fiction than from actual Christian doctrine. The idea that Jesus may have married Mary Magdalene and produced descendants existed in folklore for centuries but was not taken seriously by more than a handful of people, until Dan Brown's phenomenal bestseller The Da Vinci Code based its plot around the idea. Suddenly, lots of Christians began thinking that maybe Jesus had left descendants. Furthermore, many of them mistakenly thought that Dan Brown had uncovered the idea himself. It was also quite common for entirely fictional (i.e. not based on pre-existing folklore or conspiracy theories) aspects of the novel to also be thought of as real by such Christians.
In my personal experiences, I've also encountered quite a number of Christians who, after reading the Left Behind novels, envisioned the rapture to be just like it is portrayed in that series, despite that there are some big differences between the Left Behind novels and standard Christian doctrine about the rapture. In the realm of cryptozoology, aliens and paranormal topics, many researchers who had diligently pursued and assembled research for decades were astonished in the 1990s when a huge new wave of believers came, not from the accumulation of carefully filed evidence, but from the fanbase of a fictional television show, The X-Files. Of course, to a person thoroughly grounded in logic, the question of whether something exists or not should always be decided according the the strength of the evidence. If some weird thing exists, then it exists regardless of whether The X-Files did a good job of presenting it or not, and if a thing doesn't exist, then it still doesn't exist no matter how convincing the corresponding X-Files episode makes it look.
Of course, in most cases it makes little sense to base your beliefs on fiction, and I think it can easily be argued that in the case of such controversial topics fiction is even less reliable. When the existing nonfiction on a topic can't agree on whether or not something exists, and even the nonfiction of the variety that claims it does exist can't agree on how it operates or what characteristics it has, then there is no solid base of knowledge that the fiction could use as a foundation. It's like building on jelly. And the fiction would be a distorted version of that jelly, even less stable than the original stuff.
For example, let's say you watch Harry and the Hendersons and because of it you start believing in Bigfoot. Even from a purely scientific standpoint, thinking that Bigfoot exists isn't an entirely unreasonable belief, because a number of scientists have upheld it (just not enough to influence the scientific consensus). Furthermore, Harry and the Hendersons is probably the Bigfoot movie that is the most strongly grounded in actual scientific research. Perhaps some point made in the film suddenly caused the idea of Bigfoot to be much more plausible to you, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, I would expect a reasonable person's next step to be actually reading some nonfiction about Bigfoot before fully forming an opinion. There's a wide variety of material out there regarding eyewitness sightings, speculations about Bigfoot's biological plausibility (or lack thereof) and connections drawn to the possibility that Bigfoot could be due to the modern continuation of a type of folklore about big hairy monsters that occurs worldwide. There are an awful lot of seriously-proposed theories about Bigfoot out there, and it only makes sense that a believer should want to be directly familiar with at least some of those theories, not to merely get distorted versions that have been filtered through fiction. If you're a truly reasonable person and you found yourself in the process of shelving your disbelief, you'd want to read a bunch of nonfiction to make sure you're not stuffing your head with complete nonsense. However, even when shelving disbelief involves controversial topics, people don't necessarily seek out the nonfiction in order to help confirm or reject the convictions they've picked up from a novel or movie. In fact, I've known people who had such deep convictions derived from fiction that they refused to touch the nonfiction on that same topic.
Although rare, I've sometimes seen people make the argument that, with some topics, fiction is a better source for building your beliefs than nonfiction is. To a limited extent, I can see some sense in this argument. For example, take science fiction. Unlike fantasy, in which everything is possible, science fiction tries to build itself around reality, especially reality as it could be in the future. A great many scientific advances (such as submarines) were first imagined in the realm of science fiction. It does make some sense to base your beliefs about what the future could be like on the more realistic types of science fiction. Obviously, you'd have to be very selective, but it still might give you a better idea of what the future will be like than reading nonfiction books that speculate about the future.
Another area where fiction could be a good source for building beliefs is in social reforms. All sorts of advances for women and minorities were preceded by influential fiction, more so than by nonfiction. For example, all the nonfiction written by abolitionists had little effect in comparison to a novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (which is considered outdated enough to be racist by today's standards, but was quite the opposite according to the standards of its own time). I've also experienced a part of this in my own life. The entire time I was growing up, I was frustrated by the extremely passive roles I often saw assigned to women in television. There was one type of scene I truly loathed: the bad guys would be about the kill the good guys, however a woman would manage to get the gun. She'd threaten the villain with the gun, but he'd confidently approach her with a big sappy smile on his face, telling her in a kind of baby-talk reserved for females that she just wasn't brave enough to shoot anyone. She'd start crying, and then the villain would take the gun from her limp fingers. This happened over and over again in so many shows. It seemed that women usually couldn't stop being passive wussies even when their lives depended on it. Of course real women of that era weren't actually that bad, but seeing stuff like that all the time influences your self-image. There was a lot of nonfiction (both books and articles) around during the same time period, talking about how girls needed to envision the possibility of an active, strong female for the good of their self-esteem. Once again, the nonfiction didn't seem to make much of a dent in female self-images. However, it was about this time the action girl genre really took off with series such as Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then, female attitudes really changed (at least among my age group). Fiction had managed to break down a barrier in women's perception of themselves, while nonfiction hadn't done much except lay the groundwork.
So, it is possible to imagine circumstances where getting your beliefs from fiction instead of nonfiction could make sense. The process could even be started on purpose. In particular, it is best to assume that children and teens are going to frequently shelve their disbelief, and so if you're in charge of them it is extremely important to put some thought into the shows, movies and books they get exposed to (no, I'm not one of those busybodies in favor of draconian censorship policies protecting youngsters from the idea that anything bad could ever happen; rather than thinking all tv/videogame/movie violence is bad for kids, I think it's instead about the context things are presented in and the overall plot and themes).
What about the far less reasonable side of shelving your disbelief? Even though it is possible to imagine circumstances where works of fiction manage to teach valuable concepts that the average person would otherwise ignore, it stands to reason that a lot of weird, mostly unintended consequences could also happen that are well beyond things such as misunderstanding how guns work. If you want to go to the farthest side of weird, you can always take a peek at the mediakin. People calling themselves "mediakin" are a sub-group within the otherkin subculture. Otherkin themselves are already on the far side of weird, seeing as the bulk of their subculture is made up of people who claim to be interplanetary/reincarnated/metaphysical dragons, elves and other mythical beings, and that some of the "elves" consider Tolkien to have somehow known the "truth" about elves, and thus to a certain extent they consider his fiction to be a reliable source of spiritual information about themselves. If you've never heard of the otherkin before, you're probably pretty boggled right now, but we're about to go one step farther and discuss the mediakin, people who often boggle the otherkin.
Like the otherkin, the mediakin (also called otakukin, fictionkin and soulbonders) have a bewildering variety of beliefs about themselves that vary so much from one person to the next it is difficult to boil things down to a simple explanation. However, if anything could be described as the core belief of the mediakin, it is the idea that all fictional universes are real to at least some extent. This belief may be couched in terms of certain ideas from quantum physics which suggest that an infinite number of alternate universes exist (and that some of these would then coincidentally resemble settings created by writers). The belief may also be couched in terms of psychic powers, proposing that all writers are unknowingly psychics who are receiving clairvoyant visions from other worlds. Anyway, besides believing that fictional settings are somehow real, mediakin identify themselves as being real, actual fictional characters (sometimes individuals claim to be more than one fictional character at the same time!). The mediakin livejournal community says:
"There are worlds alongside worlds, spaces within spaces, shows outside of the shows. This community exists for the discussion of those spaces and places that are the true world on one level of existance, yet exist on this plane only as fiction. We've been there, we exist there, we watch them through those small windows of wisdom called televisions, and now we puzzle out what we know, what we remember, and what connections exist between them."
For an example, a notorious pair of mediakin are Seattle's Neo and Trinity from The Matrix. This pair is reportedly mind-boggling even within the mediakin sub-subculture, though I personally can't see much difference between them and others such as the Vincent Valentine woman, except that their "glamourbombing" attempt was mistaken (briefly) for an actual bomb.
What does this mean? It means that every degree of the "shelving of disbelief" is possible and has in fact already been done, ranging from the perceiving of various minor details of life as truly being the way they are portrayed in fiction to the full-blown acceptance of fictional settings and characters as real. It means that when writers write, they might be creating little escapist fantasies that people don't take seriously, or they might be profoundly influencing people's actual beliefs. When you're a writer, there is no way to tell how you'll be influencing people, but my guess would be that the more popular a work of fiction becomes, the more likely it is that people will turn the suspension of disbelief into the shelving of disbelief.
The whole question of mediakin brings up a lot of weird ideas. I mean beyond the obvious weird ideas. One issue that has already been raised is how this relates to writers. It's like the issues involving how the existence of fanfiction relates to the original creators, but taken to another level. For example, what happens when spiritual/religious convictions cross paths with copyright issues? It certainly got outlandish when Scientology and copyright laws clashed. Copyrights are protected under laws. So are religious beliefs, including a number of pretty outlandish-sounding claims. The mediakin phenomenon hasn't been legally endorsed as an actual religion yet, but who's to say it never will be? Fan communities are increasingly large and powerful organizations. Lots of incredibly weird and tangled issues could potentially arise, though even if such incredibly weird things do happen, it may very well be a decade or two from now. To be honest, I'm not sure what I think about all this. But I seldom see the topic of people taking their beliefs from fiction even brought up, so I thought an exploratory blog post was needed.
