Futures of Storytelling -The Definition

I recently delivered a lecture on "Futures of Storytelling" to a bunch of bright, young computer geeks in a Technical Symposium at BITS Pilani campus. The symposium was organized by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), BITS Pilani Chapter.

What follows is a serialized blog version of the lecture. In this inaugural episode, I propose a new definition for "storytelling" which can bear the burden of expectations we have about its futures, nay, our futures.

Prologue

Once upon a time, in a faraway hill down below the Vindhyas, there lived a beautiful princess. At first, it seemed like yet another ordinary day to be composted in the quicksand of memory.

When the princess went to sleep, she had a dream.

In her dream, a real hunk of a man was looking intensely at her and started coming towards her. Closer. Closer. Closer. He came so close that she could even feel his breath. She trembled. Not in fear.

“What will you do to me?”

“Well, lady. It’s your dream!”.

When you are a storyteller, as I have learned all these years, you have a great privilege. You can question anything. From mundane business plans to sublime understanding of the warp and woof of the reality which entangles us to the point of deception.

Where am I ? What place am I in? Who am I ? Who can see me? What am I doing?

When you play Pokemon Go or use any of the gadgets filling the white spaces of our lives,these questions are no longer metaphysical ones to the hoary confines of philosophers alone. They have immediate practical consequences.

This wasn't the case, if you cared to look back.

By the turn of the millennium, we had already made up our mind. We told ourselves, as we did in movies like Matrix, Tron or Terminator, that there were two realities - the superior offline world, with bright shades of blue, ruled by humans and the inferior online world, with green flowing lines, ruled by machines.

It took the unprecedented, mass psychosis of the Pokemon Go for us to re-cognize that there is no duality, no bhed, in reality. There is only one, encompassing the old, geographical reality we all grew up with.

One of my favorite physicists, Carlo Rovelli, in one of his best-selling books, Seven Brief Lessons in Physics, expressed this sentiment in poetic succinctness, when he said, "All Reality is Interaction".

Here is the funny thing.

Even if you don't study quantum mechanics or take out time to understand the latest developments in embodied cognition, you will understand this intuitively, if you have grown up with digital technologies.

You will understand that there are no things. No nouns out there except in our heads. There are only happenings. Only verbs.

The Futures of Storytelling

So, today, we are going to talk about stories. This is how the plot is going to look like.

We will first set the ground, and explore the stories of stories.

We will then explore the technologies we have created to tell those stories.

Finally, we will inquire into the politics of these stories - those forces which appear in the crevices of the stories we tell ourselves and knock us out to confront what is - reality - when we least expect it.

It is one of our old habits. We like to pretend that technology is neutral and naturally, devoid of politics. However, in the post-truth age we live in, not talking about politics is injurious to your health, especially when digital networks play seesaw in our minds with facts and illusions.

So, what is Storytelling?

The word has spread like wildfires. Social Networks have created storytellers in each of us. Or so we believe. Heck. What do we do when almost every social network prompts us to create stories?

I propose this definition which I have adapted and modified based on the work of Paul Rissen, who has done some fabulous storytelling work in BBC.

"Revelation of connected information, over time and place" (Italicized being my addition to the original definition proposed by Paul)

Allow me to unpack the three critical elements in the definition. We will go from bottom.

a) Revelation

b) Connected Information

c) Time and Place

Time:

If you think about it, irrespective of what a story is all about, every story is a time-travel story. It undertakes its journey in the arrow of time from someplace here to someplace there. (This is technically referred as Narrative time). As the arrow of time indicates, there is a linear trajectory of telling the story in such a way that we process the information and savour it, one at a time, without being overwhelmed by it.

Place:

Every story unfolds for us in a particular place we make of. It is important to differentiate place from space. Space is a mathematical construct. Place is a human construct. We experience a space through a place.

Take this public display of affection towards Spotify I spotted the other day in LinkedIn.

When a product shifts its action-play based on the place where the user is interacting from, technology becomes indistinguishable from magic.

Let me bring in one more local example.

Why do remakes of Mani Ratnam's movies fail to connect with the audience from the Northern part of the Indian subcontinent?

Take the case of his most recent movie OK Kanmani, which was promptly remade by his student mentee Shaad Ali in Hindi.

When you a shift a story rooted in one place context to another, you lose out on a lot of subtleties in translation. The story loses its density and the experience doesn't satisfy you deeply.

What was the story of a young couple from South enjoying the anonymity of Mumbai to explore live-in relationship pales out to become yet another story of a couple coming to terms with live-in relationship like most other do in Mumbai.

Place and Time:

With ambient technologies like AR, place has become an exciting, new dimension for storytellers to play with. You cannot afford to narrate and ride the story along the arrows of time alone. Possibilities are immense if you are willing to co-create "places" out of the spaces your audiences love to hang around.

Connected Information:

Narrative is built on the bedrock of connections. If films have taught us anything, we know that we enjoy the web of narrative connections the most when it is implicit, and least expected.

In the case of the Spotify example presented above, the product's ability to implicitly detect the connection and shift the context of play created the magical experience for the user.

Now, we come to the most critical part.

Revelation:

Revelation is the art of choosing when to withhold and when to release the information to maximize the story experience.

If you communicate too soon, you end up spoiling the experience. If you communicate too late, after they have lost all pent-up interest, you end up doling yet another piece of insignificant information which is not valued by the audience

How many of you have seen the movie, The Sixth Sense?

Only when we discover the spoiler information towards the end that Bruce Willis is the ghost, the movie gives us that primal kick of playing the narrative back in our head and revisit the clues the narrative teased us with, when we knew in our hearts all along that something wasn't right with the way the character of Bruce Willis was playing out in the story.

Which brings us to the most intriguing aspect about Storytelling in the digital age

If Storytellers are the world's oldest Information Architects, then all of us are storytellers.

As Chef Gusteau would have said,

"Not everyone can become a great storyteller; but a great storyteller can come from anywhere"

How can we understand stories? Can we understand them using the greatest epic of all times, The Mahabharata?

How did mankind build technologies to tell stories about himself and the world?

What about the politics of stories in the digital age which have made data into a spectacle?

We shall explore further the world of stories. Stay Tuned.