A History of Narrative Environments

I spend 90% of my time thinking about stories and narratives, and like so many other things, narrative formation is getting decentralized. This is my attempt to figure out what’s happening and where it’s heading.Crafting and telling stories is part of what makes humans humans. Stories let us coordinate across time and space. Stories are undeniably ... See more

History books are ink on paper. They are linear narratives with beginning and ends. They are stories created from archival documents and from other books. Network culture, not really into that. Network culture differs from literary culture in a great many ways. And step one is that the operating system is an unquestioned given. The first thing you ... See more

But as things get more and more abstract, as we move evermore towards a world of abundance, and as more and more of what we do and buy is for things beyond survival -- like social capital, entertainment, and utility -- the ability to weave a good narrative out of a tapestry of little stories is more valuable than it ever has been. How best to do th... See more

What is required is a new kind of storytelling, a narrative engine that lends itself to our nonlinear, networked, omni-perspective digital age.

Grand narratives can be considered large-scale formation flight paths through narrative space, modeled perhaps as a Hofstede space crossed with time. When thousands to millions of people are living out versions of aligned, small stories within a larger one, some stories will represent “drafting” off other stories. Stable societies can b

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Narrative formats enable one person’s hard-won wisdom to be translated into an accessible experience. Rather than storing knowledge as a series of facts in a CMS or in another type of productized, collaborative tool, narrative enables a writer or storyteller to simulate a knowledge-growing experience in the mind of a reader. And with a little effor... See more

Packy McCormick: We live in a world where expertise can be justly claimed by anyone who can continue to prove it. Synthesis and storytelling are the keys to navigating that world. In a world with so much information available and fewer unquestioned experts, the ability to let large amounts of information wash over you, figure out where to dive deep... See more