Seeing media through a wider lens
I’m taking a broader view of the journalism profession during my fellowship year at Stanford.
People love stories that confirm the beliefs they have about the world, stories that leave us feeling validated, comforted and less alone.
Yet, stories also have the potential to challenge our worldviews, give us access to experiences we can never have ourselves and even change our minds.
I’m a multimedia, narrative-focused journalist who uses the tools of fiction to humanize, challenge stereotypes and bring facts to life. In addition to working in print, I’ve written a play and a memoir, edited an anthology of testimonies, hosted a podcast, and I’m currently working collaboratively on a non-fiction graphic novel.
Throughout my career, I’ve often been frustrated by confirmation bias, the fact that most of the media people consume consists of stories and information they already agree with.
Every medium I’ve worked in has taught me something new about how to tell stories, but rarely in my career have I had the time to slow down and ask why I’ve chosen a particular medium to cover a particular topic, or whether it was the best one. During my first three months at Stanford as a JSK Journalism Fellow, I’ve had the space to do just that. I’ve immersed myself in thinking, reading and having conversations about the unique strengths — and inherent limitations — of various forms of media.
Much of my recent attention has been focused on understanding two forms of media: virtual reality and the graphic novel. These two mediums represent the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what I love about storytelling. I’ve come up with three categories: stories that are activated by the self, stories that sideline the self and stories that encourage immersion and/or repetition. These categories are not intended to be comprehensive; they just represent my process of discovery over the last three months.
A medium — whether it’s photography, fiction or television — is a bridge, a bridge between the world of the viewer and the world that the storyteller is presenting. In journalism, our subjects are living and breathing people and real situations. We have a responsibility to deliver a fair and accurate view of the world. Yet, a bridge can never be truly objective. It is constructed in a time and a place with a purpose.
Let’s start with graphic novels, the relatively new genre of a novel told in comic-strip format. Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist from the 1960s, described the comic book as a “cool” medium. While flipping through its pages, your mind is given flashes of images — a close-up of a twisted mouth, perhaps, juxtaposed with an empty street — as well as snippets of inner and outer dialogue. Your mind is tasked with taking these visual and lexical scraps, the relatively little information you’ve been given, and piecing them together into dynamic characters and a coherent narrative.
Cognitive scientists agree that perception is mostly filling in. Our brains are constantly filling in everything we see with our past experiences and personal beliefs, whether it’s the tree outside our window or the nightly news. The longer we live the more information and experience we have, and therefore the more rigid our cognition tends to become.
Stories can help with this, by taking in different views of the world our cognition can expand both in its capacity and flexibility. In a graphic novel there are spaces on the page between each frame called gutters. The reader is called upon to fill this emptiness with her own imagination. What happens, for example, between the twisted mouth and the image of the empty street? Has a burglar left the scene? Is he still lurking behind the fence? In a “cool” medium, like Twitter or photography, the views you come in with flow into the gaps, our minds activate the story by filling in the blanks with our experiences or self.
This mental work unleashes the power of story, but it also highlights story’s limited scope. Left to their own devices, our brains tend to turn characters we like more or less into ourselves, and to dislike characters we don’t understand. In other words, we identify with stories that reflect who we already are, rather than those that challenge our own biases and blind spots.
Enter virtual reality, or VR, perhaps the “hottest” medium yet created. Were he alive today, McLuhan might agree with me that during a VR experience your brain is spoon-fed so much sensory input that you’re doing much less of the usual amount of cognitive “filling” yourself. Instead of activating the story with your past experiences, VR has the potential to bypass the self, giving us an experience we could otherwise never have and expanding our imaginative libraries.
I recently experienced a VR piece titled “Ahorse,” created by Wendy Gutman, at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam. In it, I found myself in a room where a fireplace was burning next to me. When I closed my eyes, I could feel a subtle warmth on the side of my body closest to the flame. In the same piece, a few minutes later, I found myself riding a horse at breakneck speed. When a figure in the distance threw an apple in my direction, I reflexively reached up to catch it.
Now, feeling a fire or catching an apple in VR might sound pretty pointless to a journalist whose job it is to illuminate events in the real world. But perhaps the power of this virtual experience is not unrelated to our job to present information in a way that people can absorb, integrate and be changed by. Perhaps this medium can give someone enough of an emotional experience to make them question their beliefs and be open to considering other explanations.
That brings me to my third and last category: repetition. Most cognitive scientists agree that repetition is more likely to result in permanent or lasting change. That’s why a single news story, or 5 minutes in VR, is unlikely to stick with us for long.
I recently had an experience with a silent graphic novel called “The Arrival” by Shaun Tan. The entire book is wordless, a story told in pictures alone. I found myself so deeply involved in the silent world the author had created that the world around me dropped away. Days later, I kept seeing things in the real world that reminded me of the fictional one, almost like the story was so deeply imprinted on my brain that I continued to project it on the world around me. Like music or binge-watching TV, it’s an emotional experience I yearn to return to and share.
What can we learn from looking at different forms of media and/or the tools of fiction that can help journalism be better? What can these experiences and observations teach us about storytelling as a whole?
We’re living through a political moment where it’s perhaps clearer than ever how trapped most of us are in our own belief systems. To address this, as journalists, we must try to understand as much about the tools at our disposal as possible.
Whether it’s global warming, police brutality, abortion or gun control, the stories we tell should help us step outside of what we believe to be true, even briefly, in an attempt to try to understand what we may or may not be getting right.
Yet in using “tools of fiction” in our work, it’s important for journalists to ask ourselves where our red lines should be drawn. How can we remain vigilant in our pursuit of fair and balanced reporting and still make use all the creative tools at our disposal? What are some agreed upon principles that can guide us?
I plan to address these questions in my next medium post. In the meantime, if you have comments or are interested in discussing this topic further, please reach out to me at: sshourd@Stanford.edu. I’d love to know what examples come to mind of works of non-fiction that walk this tightrope well.
