The Story of Data Driven Storytelling
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Chief Marketing Officer, @Magisto
Storytelling and Big Data are two of the buzziest buzzwords of 2017. They’re howled from the halls of Madison Avenue, the hills of Hollywood and the sprawl of Silicon Valley and with good reason. Data is to Storytelling as the brick is to building. The two comprise the central pillar of communication and arguably the foundation of human civilization. Definitely the central pillars and the genius of Facebook. By way of understanding the role of storytelling and data as it pertains to commerce, communication and community going forward its useful to take a look backwards.
The Biochemistry of Story
There is a bio-chemical reason we love stories. It’s the mode of communication our brains biologically prefer. When presented with dry data and numbers without context the brain hears Charlie Brown’s teacher’s mush mouth. When a good story is told the brain comes alive and alight with emotion. Storytelling literally has a chemical effect on the brain that wakes it up in order to ingest, digest and store information. Enthralled in a good story we see ourselves as the central character in that story. We make the tale our own. The scientific nomenclature for this is “neural coupling”. We also build an emotional bond with the storyteller that scientists call mirroring. As opposed to unpackaged data, stories are “juicy” they awaken many parts of the brain, which is referred to as cortex activity. Lastly as a result of all of this activity we get a shot of dopamine, which makes us feel good. In short stories are the best way to deliver complex information (data) to the human brain they capture us and make us feel good. The best artists, salesmen, teachers, politicians, business leaders and data scientists have one thing in common — they are all fantastic storytellers, they help us live their message.
The Power of Story and Population:
In making a case for the power of storytelling. I recently did a @Google search on the birth of written language and the growth of human population. What I found was exciting but not surprising. The first archeological record of written language shows up about 5000 years BC. Almost exactly at that same time we see the first exponential growth of the human population on earth. Written language was arguably the first technological innovation, which gave us as a species the power to convey story in a physical format, and thus visualize, archive and share that data with community members and future generations. One could argue that the real exponential jump we see in population in the last 200 years is also directly related to story. The ability to share massive amounts of knowledge related to medicine, nutrition, and engineering has given us as a species the ability to defy nature. That obviously has potentially profoundly negative implications but — in making the case for the power of story as it relates to data it’s a pretty compelling argument. Innovation in our ability to create, archive and share information in the form of story has changed our ability to survive and prosper and quite literally marks the beginning of human history. My hope is that the use of big data and story can also help us out of the mess we’ve created as a result of pushing the boundaries of nature so that its not the premise of our unmaking as well…
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Storytelling
The birth of written language and later innovations in our ability to communicate represent step function accelerants to the quality and quantity of human life on earth. It’s interesting to sniff at how stories power humanity in a more granular way. To do so I took a stab at layering the role of story on top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. What you get, while imperfect, is another pretty compelling case for the role of story in human evolution.
From its inception stories were used as a tool to understand and find resources and food. What the crude image of an animal on a cave wall is likely communicating was something like “hey man the buffalo are over there and they are delicious.”
Storytelling around the campfire is another primal image. Given the biochemistry associated with storytelling huddling around a fire to spin yarns not only provided physical safety, psychological well-being but also data. Data, story, knowledge transfer, community and dopamine!
Fast forward 2000 years from the birth of written language and the Egyptians introduced the earliest fully-developed base 10 numeration system. The pyramids themselves are a living monument to the sophistication and integration of Egyptian use of data and story.
We go from Egyptian math to the most famous stories of all time the Bible and other religious texts, epic stories that prescribe a moral code for how to conduct ones life. Many of the earliest biblical scripts are derived from observations on health and safety. They prescribe a civil and moral code wrapped in story. The bible doesn’t say — “Don’t covet thy neighbor because its generally a good way to create strife”. Rather the story tells us Moses spoke directly to God and received divine guidance around coveting and such. The Bible and other religious texts transform dry civil code into the most powerful and binding narratives of all time. Jump another 2500 years or so and formal education sprouts wings and we start to look to schools as a place to learn all of the data packed stories for being successful and productive. Having figured out how to survive and constructed repeatable stories for understanding and engaging the world around us we move to storytelling as a form of enjoyment. From resonance art to modern day sitcoms these tales delight us to no end but they also inform us. What is the news or late night comedy? A form of entertainment laden with information, data, data, data.
Storytelling has a diverse roll in our history as a species and our modern day to day lives but regardless of how and when a story finds us one thing rings universally true — the better the story the more valuable it is.
Storytelling as a Driver of Innovation
Storytelling and our need for it drives technological innovation. To the left is a rendering of an idea that I borrowed from Parsons School of Design. What it shows is the evolution of storytelling technology — largely in the form of hardware. From the invention of paper to the printing press, the telegraph to the telephone, the computer to the cell phone. With the advent of the smartphone, a portable computer with with millions of times more computing power than NASA used to put a man on the moon in 1969, the entire history of storytelling and more than likely the blue prints for the future of storytelling now fits in your pocket.
In the quest to collect, store, analyze and share data through better stories software has also evolved at a breakneck speed. History will remember Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg with the same import as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven for the impact they have had on culture and humanity.
These technologist, their vision and their software unlocked the ability for all of us to transform unfathomable amounts of information (read data) into consumable media (read stories). One of the reasons that we are experiencing a data crisis of sorts is that the entire system almost works to well. It creates a positive (or negative depending on your POV) reinforcing loop, more data, more innovation , more ways to present and consume data and more data generated. We are quite literally drowning in data and story helps us find the signal through the noise.
Conclusion: Data and Story Are Sociologically and Biologically Bound
To revisit the head of this tale my central assertion is that information, or as we call it these days data, and story go hand in hand. They are sociologically and biologically bound to the human condition. Language was the first massive innovation driven by a need to organize, warehouse and distribute both functional and emotional information. The creation and use of data is a spectrum that has evolved from very broad applications in early cave drawings into the unimaginable granularity of the digitally integrated world. As a blunt read on this notion the printing press was invented in 1440 and today, 600 years later, the world has 160 million books. That’s roughly 2,600 books per year. By comparison the World Wide Web was created in 1989 and in about 30 years we have 1 Billion active websites. That’s about 33,000 websites per year. Or 13x the number of books created per year. If you were to print the Internet it would take approximately 305,Trillion pages. Some other mind blowing stats to frame our study of data and story…. today June 11 2017 there are 3.6 billion people on the internet — half of the world is connected right now as I write. So far we have executed 4 Billion Google searches, and send 175 Billion emails as of 4pm Pacific Time today.
The numbers are staggering and only headed up and to the right. Lots of data is consumedby machines only and some is simply lost to the world. But the core drive of human beings to capture analyze and connect via information is still alive and kicking and it’s the same old story. Data is useless to our brains unless it can be presented in a narrative that makes it emotionally and biochemically “tasty”. Even the mechanical use of data to present relevant digital ads has a strong emotional effect and an element of story. Send the right message to the right person at the right time, tell them what your story is and why they should care. In summary all of the tech buzz words of 2017: storytelling, big data, A.I., VR, AR, IoT, video, are all connected chapters in the story of all stories — our endless endeavor to improve prosperity by connecting information and people through narrative. I’m Reid Genauer, reporting from Menlo Park CA and thats just the beginning of our story but the end of this tale.
And Now Back To Our Regular Schedule “Programing”
Reid Genauer
Chief Marketing Officer, @Magisto
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