Why stories?
In the talk, The storytelling animal: Jonathan Gottschall at TEDxFurmanU, Jonathan Gottschall tells about the pervasive role stories play in the human experience. Storytelling is one way humans are able to perceive reality and make sense of the events unfolding around them. Reality is essentially organized by the storytellers of the world.
Meaning, however, cannot be created and widely distributed to people without going through some sort of cognitive filter. Most people are predisposed to favor information that supports their existing beliefs, and less likely to consider information counter to their existing beliefs, a condition called confirmation bias. This bias hampers reason-based decision-making and prevents a person from considering and using new ideas that are counter to the ones they already believe. Compelling arguments are needed for overcoming these types of biases, no matter what kind of story is being told.
A poorly delivered story presents us with what we can think of as a bad argument – that is that this story is not reasonable, we don't care about it, and it doesn't appeal to our sense of identity. Skepticism of new ideas can be assuaged with the persuasive argument's appeal to logic (logos), emotions (pathos), and ethics (ethos). What is reasonable, emotionally moving, and indicative of a someone's sensibilities is often specific to one point in history; from one culture to another; and from one person to another. For many, however, the appeal to emotion seems to be the driving force of an effective story, often moving viewers past logical or ethical shortcomings that may be present.
Great storytellers can have great impact. Storytelling does more than just help people understand the world. It motivates great action to be taken, moving an imagined dream into being. In this way, people who create and disseminate stories have a tremendous amount of power to shape the world. With this power comes an implicit contract with your audience – that what they are experiencing is authentic in a manner that allows them to understand a deeper truth.
A person can now read, watch, interact with, or listen to a new story every day for the rest of their life. Social media technology gives marketers the power to directly market stories according to a person's existing beliefs and interests, thereby surrounding a person in only the stories that support the reality they have already bought into. What effects might this have on a given society's ability to organize and govern when its inhabitants have found different interpretations of reality to be the "truth"?
Story and object
Semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, has produced models for describing how meaning is communicated; Ferdinand de Saussure's dyadic model consists of the signifier and the signified, and the Charles Sanders Peirce triadic model consists of icons, indices, and symbols. Just like Forrest Gump's shoes, objects are "sign vehicles," targets of mental acts but these objects do not have to be physical things. From the perspective of storytelling, objects are the medium by which a story is told. The authors of the book, The Axemaker's Gift, remind us that humans figured out how to do this with writing approximately 12,000 years ago.
"The first examples of writing occurred in the Near East at the time when animals and plants were being domesticated. They took the form of clay tokens, smaller than an inch in size, used to represent different commodities." [1]
The significance of this event is that people could now ascribe meaning (in this case to count grain and livestock for trade) using abstract markings on clay tokens. The token was a standardized signifier, which made commerce possible in prehistoric times. Eventually, the desire to describe other types of information led to the development of a written language and number systems. Out of that arose complex social structures, division of labor, law, cities, property ownership, and other aspects of modern civilization.
Stories, media, and society
Because story is ubiquitous to the human experience, you find it embedded in almost every human endeavor where communication of some kind is involved. Creative products like films, novels, drawings, paintings, comic books, and games tell stories to highlight moral quandaries, to contribute to discourse on a popular or marginalized subject, to function a teaching tool, to entertain, to enlighten, and to otherwise encapsulate cultural expression. Architecture uses form and dimension of space and structure to tell the story of how people should use space, to signal the culture of a place, and to describe other aspects of sheltered human interaction.
In product and service design, graphic designers use visual design elements to communicate simple ideas like how to use a voting ballot or abstract ideas like company brand identities. Industrial designers use visual and sculptural elements to communicate what a product does and how it should be used. Story can help businesses empathize with customers to create better products and services, recognize new ways of approaching solutions, and help customers choose between similar products.
Journalists working for televised news stations, newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other publications combine photography, video, and investigative reporting techniques to communicate information about events. War of the Worlds, a fiction written by H. G. Wells and adapted by Orson Welles to simulate a live news broadcast, was read on the live radio on Halloween in 1938, causing some listeners to panic, believing that there was a real alien invasion occurring. Similar in format to radio shows, podcast shows now combine journalism techniques, creative writing, and sound editing to tell compelling audio stories.
Politicians use stories to gain public support for proposed policies and actions whereas activists use coordinated gatherings with signage, music, song, dance, and other types of performance to communicate their stories to the general public. Social change agents use stories to create empathy through all forms of media, helping bring attention to marginalized members of society.
Citations
- Burke, James, and Robert Evan Ornstein. The Axemaker's Gift: Technology's Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture. 1st trade pbk. ed. New York: Putnam, 1997.