The Story 2011
I went to The Story conference in London last Friday, where twelve (or so) people told us about things to do with storytelling. It was a great day - here are some of my notes. (I’m grateful for and inspired by the notes of others in this regard.)
Best image:
…from Mary Hamilton.
Stories as constraints. Matt Adams quoted Edmond Jabes as saying “A story limits the life of someone to what someone else can say about it.” Adam Curtis talked about how we’ve become suspicious of the journalistic “story,” a format that constrains reporting of real events to a certain narrative and discards the detail that doesn’t fit. Karl James actually credited his storylistening ability to ”not being a journalist looking for a story.” He described how the stories people tell themselves about their lives can harden through habit, preventing newer, more surprising stories from emerging. Mary Hamilton talked about how including fewer pre-scripted events in her ZombieLARP actually helped surprising stories come about in the game. Lucy Kimbell played with the absurdity of reducing herself to a set of statistics and metrics, a story limited to a single number. And Mark Stevenson fretted that a pessimistic view of our technological, environmental and economic future as “a mere damage-limitation exercise” meant we were setting our sights too low, and argued for a more optimistic narrative about human progress in order to maximise our potential.
The story in the details. Archival footage of an interview with a Taliban commander revealed it as a bizarre farce. A recorded interview with the father of a sick child drew more power from the agonizing pause in conversation than the words that followed. The yearly putting-up-of-curtains at a quaint northern church was a synecdoche for an entire set of customs and a culture in decline. Sculptures told stories about churches ablaze. A Nerf gun turns a civillian into a hero. And maybe the I.T Crowd is just a thousand hours of procrastination artfully compressed.
Listening and not-listening. Karl James talked movingly about the importance of listening, and how listening well helps people be articulate and tell their own, surprising stories. Powerful stuff. Conversely, Matt Adams presented an interactive SMS drama called ivy4ever. This involves the reader following the story of a maybe (?) pregnant teenage girl via text message, and occasionally offering advice to her by texting back. The keenly-felt distinction here is that Ivy’s responses are completely unaffected by whatever you say to her - she’s not listening at all. I’m usually sceptical of this kind of gr8-txt-spk-4-t33ns project, so I was surprised to see some of the humane and genuine responses teenagers gave to Ivy. But it was only afterwards I felt a slight sadness about all these kids talking… to nobody at all. Perhaps it’s just a harmless outlet for what we all do when we watch a TV show - think about what we’d do in the protagonist’s situation. (“DON’T RUN AWAY *UP* THE STAIRS!”) It just sat uncomfortably alongside the intense intimacy of a person-to-person dialogue.
Adam Curtis gave a really great talk. The thing about Adam Curtis is, he’s never very happy with how things are going. Things are always going from bad to a new, more appealing kind of bad. Typically something like: “…and so the yoke of conformity gave through to something new - the cult of individualism.” His basic schtick is that while society may seem to undergo structural change, power always finds a way to use the new structure as a means of control. I see his point, although I don’t actually agree that’s why we all have iPhones. I think it’s because iPhones are pretty good!
I liked his point about the internet allowing us to engage directly with the chaotic and contradictory material behind the news. He suspects, in his own sceptical way, that we’ll stop trying to follow convential journalistic “stories” about events - finding them suspiciously simplistic - and instead just be satisfied with the visceral, emotional impact of the primary source. But I actually think it will give a larger number of storytellers the opportunity to create stories about the world, and I think that will ultimately result in better stories.
I do see a danger, in that I’m reminded of 24hr news’s obsession with “being there” - always stranding a correspondent right at the scene of some breaking news, even though nothing is really happening, and the actual newsgathering would be more effectively done from a newsroom. In the same way, “being informed” might become a bit too much about seeing the very latest cameraphone upload from a protest, rather than understanding the history behind it. But I think the far greater risk (in terms of “power being exercised”) is leaving the job of constructing social narratives to a small elite. Adam Curtis has several terabytes of archival footage from the BBC’s reporting in Afghanistan, and surely hopes to use it to tell a challenging, original story about the conflict there. If more people had access to those terabytes, what other stories would end up being told? (Aren’t people doing more interesting things with and around Pepys’ Diary now Phil Gyford’s given people the resources to do so?)
Conviction. One final thing. The day really benefited from the quality of the speakers and their passion for their respective topics. I think it’s trendy to be a bit self-effacing these days. “Oh, here’s a little thing I’ve noticed, no big deal really, kind of neat I guess.” And it’s certainly not a bad strategy to avoid being arrogant and hyperbolic. But done live, it can make me wish that I’d just read the blog notes afterwards. Conversely, The Story had an energy that made attending in person priceless, and I put that down to speakers who, whether they were being serious or playful, really stood behind what they were talking about.
- If “a story limits a person to what other people can say about him” then how does a game limit a person? To the achievements they’ve unlocked?
- What matters, gets measured - the idea of the quantified self, what we choose to measure or track about our lives is similar to how we choose to tell different stories about ourselves. Gamey/gamification relevance. What data do we have that tells stories we might be better off not telling? What if Google Reader didn’t tell me how many unread items I had? If we didn’t know how many Twitter followers we had? Is LK right that putting numbers on things can get a bit absurd?
- Losing the fear of awkwardness seems to be an important part of listening well.
- What’s the digital version of an exploded shed? Those “my year in status” things??
