The Meaninglessness of The News
One of the most important definitions of what we are is a story. We are what we tell ourselves about ourselves, what other people might tell about us, what kinds of stories or narratives we emulate and identify with. No one can be just ‘a thing’, what we are is more like a pattern, and patterns are represented in stories that we tell. Stories are everywhere, we watch them constantly in movies and television series, read them in books, autobiography and biographies, fiction and nonfiction, we talk about our day, our week, our year, the events of our lives through the language and form of stories.
However, one of the most important qualities of stories that we easily forget, is that as much as stories are representations of reality, they are also simultaneously interpretations of reality. This is true for several reasons, firstly because we prioritise elements of events through the filter of a story, through its selection and elision, what we mention and what we cut out. And secondly because stories involve the tropes of literature and fiction, in other words they are continuously full of reference, metaphor, suggestiveness, allegory, irony, symbol and the continual interpretive ‘aboutness’ that constitutes the overarching sense and meaning of every story we tell.
