This is Part 3 of a subscriber-only preview of my upcoming book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds. We will release the first five chapters through the end of the year. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2
There are countless ways to describe what a story is and what it does. We might say that a story is a description of a series of things that happened, or else we might say that a story is how we imagine something that might have happened. Joseph Conrad taught us that story is sometimes a public dream and sometimes a private myth. Leo Tolstoy or whomever we decide actually said it reminds us that story boils down to a man going on a journey or a stranger coming to town[i]. Joan Didion embraces story as humanity’s tool to ‘freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.’ All useful definitions, all true.
And yet our purpose in this book is to understand how story springs from and interacts with human consciousness under different conditions. For that reason, I think it is most useful to resolve toward a definition which aligns with how our brain processes and produces story, and also toward how human societies continuously explore, refine, and influence the meaning of those stories. This will also help us to establish a through-line – important for any Narrative – between the evolutionary processes and imperatives which predispose us to tell and seek out stories on the one hand, and the technologies like writing or social networks which expose us to them on the other. So what is story?
An elegant, eloquent, and powerful start! Gonna be a great read.
It makes me consider the overwhelming power of AI taking over social networks.
And binge drinking, which likely hasn’t reached a pinnace yet.
At what point does binge become baseline, and powerful cannabinoids, ketamine, and (perhaps) other soon-to-be-available psychotropics dull the wider population even more than their smartphones already have?
Smartphone sports gambling probably gets there first.
When it goes Orwellian and is referred to as “Victory Bingeing”.
I got a small shudder when your autocorrect killed some humor when you simply copied and replied to part of my comments. That was not expected at all. Did you make a manual change?
“Pinnace” was intentional on my part, being part of the semantic meaning wordplay like Rusty and Shakespeare were having fun with in the article.
Spooky
I did make the change, thoughtlessly assuming that your autocorrect left intact a marine reference. I’m sorry - went right over my head. Hardly spooky, anything that goes on in there.
Rusty, do you think what you’re describing is a new field of study?
I don’t think so. It’s a multidisciplinary application, to be sure, but I think as we progress you’ll see that many of the underlying topics have pretty robust fields of scholarship to call upon.
May it bring scholars from around the world to a major university in Nashvegas.
Jim
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Stepping down from the empyrean heights of the Gospel of John: humans have not done well when new media - new ways to tell the stories - have become widespread. Whether it was the printing press and the subsequent Reformation and Wars of Religion, to the newspaper and the revolutions in America and France, to broadcast media and the rise of both communism and fascism, to apparently social media today, it seems the less savory actors tend to harness the system first, only to unleash havoc that eventually settles into some sort of new, purportedly wiser order. That is, until the next form of media comes along.
Reminded me of this:
Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories
David Comberg 1.34K subscribers
2,050,888 views | Oct 30, 2010
Short lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the ‘simple shapes of stories.’