Modern Society and Story Telling

It seems that as a society our process of story telling is broken. The majority does no tell stories, rather they watch stories, record stories but do not really share stories.

There is no explicit feedback between the story tellers and the vast consumers of those stories. As a result our societies capacity for learning is impaired. In a sense, it seems that our society has degenerated to have a lower level of awareness.

The flow of views, concepts and feelings is one directional and is guided by commerce rather than passion.

Again, it is as if the speakers in our world are so self absorbed that there is no feedback from other parts of 'the self' or from the 'reality' outside of 'the self'. In this case 'the self' referrers to the entire society and to an onlooker it would probably seem as if the whole society was simply completely absorbed in it self - sometimes in a manic way, and at other times in a depressed way.

This process of self absorbed behaviour has become institutionalised in our top-down hierarchical chains of command. In many countries there is democracy, but the common instantiation merely plays lip service to the need for feedback, while being careful to not really respond to the feedback.

It seems that before the industrial revolution there were various levels at which this feedback still functioned. At the community level, there would be an oral tradition of telling stories. This allowed many different narrators to subtly and gradually influence the stories with their own views and the views of the communities to which they responded. Similarly, because there where many, loosely connected towns, each one could specialise the stories in ways that where important to them. Once in a while these evolved stories would cross over to the next town or community and the process would continue. Slowly, social truths and values would be distilled out.

However, through the use of written forms this evolution of stories becomes less fluid. Through the use of movies, even the room for interpretation has all but been removed. Simultaneously, the written form and other means of communication allow for more explicit and rigid top-down control from those in power.

In is no wonder that modern society has been pushed back to nuclear families and that there seems to be an increasing sense of disconnectedness and meaninglessness in the world. Slowly, but surely the reach of our feedback has actually been pushed back to within the boundaries of the individual.

However, this push back seems to have created an increasing need within the individuals for being self aware. For, the individuals are not confined in a dark world, rather it is as if they have each been put behind one-way glass where they can see and hear the world but nobody can see or hear them. With all this information raining down on them, they still need to process it and make sense of it. Yet, the only means for this is via increased internal awareness.

Recently, it seems that we have started to see the tell-tail signs of individuals beginning to push back with their individual feedback, for the same technologies that have enabled the top-down rigid control, have finally begun to be accessible to all the individuals in our society. In a few short years we have seen as explosion in personal web pages and blogs . Soon afterwards we saw the inclusion of comment mechanisms enabling the story teller to obtain feedback from their audience.

Now, we need to start growing the processes for meaningfully assimilating these stories and retelling them so that, once again, values and concepts can be distilled out. So that, once again, society can learn from its own experiences and recreate its internal awareness.

Only, this time it will be impossible to do this without simultaneously being aware of context of all of humanity and the environment of our entire planet.