Community Narration and Storytelling

Any one person’s story can change the way we think — and in changing the way enough people think, it can change our world. But what of the stories that cannot be told by one person alone? What of the stories that touch many people, all of whom have different perspectives and points of view? ...

If storytelling could become, like everything else today, more interactive and social, it would open a new world of possibilities. How many communities could benefit from telling their stories as a community?

Storytelling as Engagement

The power of community storytelling lies not only in the stories created – but also in the process of their creation. Storytelling itself has a unique power to engage — that hasn’t changed since the dark ages. Is there anything more compelling than a great story? If we sniff one out, don’t we hunt it down tirelessly and even try to be the first to report it out to others? And if we have one of our own, most of us can hardly wait to offer it up to whomever will listen. It’s what we do, and what we have done since the beginning of time. Imagine if we could come together, within the physical and virtual communities we live in, to tell our stories as a community — to be a part of something bigger, part of something that matters to us. We may not be a leader in each community, but we know we have something special, something important, that only we can contribute. And we recognize and acknowledge those members who respond to, and are inspired by, our contributions.

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Storytelling in Collaboration

... If the community is invested and engaged in creating the story, then virtually by definition… the story is engaging — to the community that created it, since the audience and the creators are one. And that is what matters most. But that doesn’t mean that all contributions will be appreciated equally. Within the community not all members can or will share the same perspective — nor will they necessarily have the same skills or tastes in their delivery. They may share a common story, but with different perspectives, points of view, passions, skill levels, etc.

A second, perhaps more profound, view of culture frames it as collective meaning-making. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz rather beautifully writes that:

Believing, with Max Weber, that man [sic] is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. [Geertz, 1973, (1993), p. 5]

If culture comprises the ‘web’ through which each of us makes sense of the world, seeing science communication as culture encourages us to understand it as a space of collective meaning-making. It is not simply an aspect of the ‘intellectual refinement’ of societies (to re-quote du Gay et al. from above), but the mundane “production and the exchange of meanings — the ‘giving and taking of meaning’ — between the members of a society or group” [Hall, 1997, p. 2]. This is significant in part because it flies against commonsense assumptions that science communication is primarily concerned with the transmission or negotiation of information [Davies and Horst, 2016; Michael, 2002]. In this view, rather than public communication being about the transfer of certain facts — the nature of DNA, the scientific method, whether vaccines cause autism — it is instead about how particular societies or groups explain the world. Understanding science communication as meaning-making therefore draws our attention to its functions at the level of shared identities and imaginations, alongside its undoubted role in disseminating particular scientific notions.

This shift in analytical emphasis from transmission to culture echoes similar discussions in communication research. In his essays on communication as culture, James Carey [1989] offers a ritual view of communication as an alternative to a transmission model. The ritual view, he says, “is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs” (p. 5). He uses the (perhaps outdated) example of reading a newspaper to explore this ritual view. People may have learned something while reading newspapers, but they did not read to comprehend information. Rather, the newspaper was part of a shared experience; a ritual that, like a Catholic mass, allowed people to perform and confirm a particular worldview.

Cybernetics is the science or art of manipulating defensible metaphors, showing how they can be constructed and what can be inferred as a result of their existence.

MONBIOT: So we are creatures of narrative. The trick that we have learnt - in fact, more than learnt, which is hard-wired into our brains is to look for a story that explains our situation, whatever that situation might be, which tells us where we stand, how we got there, where we're trying to get to and how we're going to get to that place.

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And it's not just stories in general that we are attuned to but particular narrative structures. There are a number of basic plots that we use again and again. And in politics, there is one basic plot which turns out to be tremendously powerful. And I call this the restoration story. It goes as follows - disorder afflicts the land, caused by powerful and nefarious forces working against the interests of humanity. But the hero will revolt against this disorder, fight those powerful forces, against the odds overthrow them and restore harmony to the land.

You've heard this story before. It's the Bible story. It's the "Harry Potter" story. It's the "Lord Of The Rings" story. But it's also the story that has accompanied almost every political and religious transformation going back millennia. In fact, we could go as far as to say that without a powerful new restoration story, a political and religious transformation might not be able to happen. It's that important.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ZOMORODI: George says we don't have to go back too far to hear that restoration story. It's what we heard during the Great Depression.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

MONBIOT: Disorder afflicts the land. Caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of the economic elite which have captured the world's wealth. But the hero of the story...

ZOMORODI: And when that restoration story fell apart, neoliberals came up with their own version.

MONBIOT: You'll never guess what's coming. Disorder afflicts the land caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of the overmighty state. But the hero with the story - the entrepreneur will fight...

ZOMORODI: But once that narrative crumbled with the 2008 recession, George says we never came up with a new one. And that's a problem.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

MONBIOT: And that is why we're stuck. Without that new story, we are stuck with the old, failed story that keeps on failing. Despair is the state we fall into when our imagination fails. When we have no story that explains the present and describes the future, hope evaporates. Political failure is at heart a failure of imagination.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ZOMORODI: So, George, what is the story that we need right now to help us focus on the future and maybe the greater good?

MONBIOT: So my very rough sketch of the story would go as follows - the world has been thrown into disorder by the powerful and nefarious forces of neoliberalism who have torn society apart in their efforts to atomize and rule, ripping down our economic safety nets, ripping down our public services. But the heroes of the story, who is potentially almost all of us, can, against the odds, work to overthrow those powerful and nefarious forces by rebuilding community, by creating, through mutual aid, the powerful communities which we have an almost innate disposition to try to create. And through those communities, we start to build a far more participatory, deliberative democracy than we tend to have at the moment. And in doing so - by rebuilding community, by showing that there is such a thing as society - we can restore harmony to the land.