Storytelling and narratives in the digital age
There was a time when I got really worked up with all the hype around Big Data. I was fed up with the legion of technophiles infatuating over how data would solve all our problems, riding on the silly notion that people will change once they understand the facts. The bare facts.
“Don’t give me stories. Give me facts”, was the cultural mantra I remember as a child growing up with. Little did I expect that in the ensuing years I would grow into an adult, technology would completely transform that old mantra into “I have more facts than I care to bother. Give me a story”. I started paying attention to stories and narratives. I noticed how narratives tended themselves to the meaning we sought and manipulated from information. An exploration which started off as a reaction to a technology hype took on a life of its own.
In the Burrakatha storytelling traditions of south India, it is said that the gypsies always begin their tales after beating their drums.Please bear with me for few moments as I beat my own drums.
When I was a kid, I was partial to stories involving adventures with wild animals. I used to imagine running my family zoo much like that Indian boy from Pondicherry in the movie Life of Pi.
The persistent fiction I remember narrating to myself were varied episodes of my school teachers and friends visiting the zoo, while I played the gracious host showing them around, walking inside the cages with insouciant abandon and playing merrily in my alternate eco-universe with all kinds of wild animals.
As I grew up, like any adult would, I took the world too seriously and forgot about stories until one day when Nassim Nicholas Taleb woke me up with a thud from the delusions of seriousness my consulting work habituated me with.
Consulting, a profession grounded in building narratives and naive rationalization — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I began to enjoy the irony of zooming in my lens on narratives only after Taleb took enough pains to argue against the perils of narrative thinking with all its biases. Rather than getting cynical, I reasoned to myself, it would be more wiser to leverage the power afforded by the tools of narratives more responsibly.
Today, as a blogger and consultant, I tell two kinds of stories. One, involving numbers and narratives, which help my clients frame decisions around technology. Two, involving those stories- of climate change, organic farming, earth-friendly living — which aid my inquiry into matters of personal ( and thereby) political responsibility. It is true that stories of the second kind are conveniently ignored by the traditional media. It is also true (and ironic) that the stories of the first kind sponsored those of the second kind.
Once upon a time…
Great stories have always unfolded in the warm, cozy, ambience offered by campfires. Whenever flames lit up the dark, the air turned introspective, perhaps at the sight of our own shadows, and we narrated intimate stories of the world around us.
Recent research based on the data from Ju/’Hoan hunter-gatherers from Southern Africa suggest that the ancient camp fires might have led to the birth of storytelling.
Today, in the precincts of a wi-fi network, we have started narrating a different kind of story. An episodic narrative filled with micro-moments, with each moment no bigger than a blip inside the radar of our attention. In this new form of story, it is funny to observe that even when we do not say a word, our very presence — the fragment of our existence inside the digital ether — throws in enough digital bread crumbs inside the narrative soup we stir and share with our friends and our world.
__________________________________________________________________
I am glad you took time to read my post. In my next post, I will tackle the question which intrigues me the most — Why do ideas come and go while stories stay forever? Watch out this space in the next couple of days.
Originally published at www.linkedin.com on December 15, 2014.
