Three tenets of reality creation: narrative, curation, and repetition
The ability to choose what matters in a world drowning in what doesn’t.
Taste Is the New Intelligence
. The Database has displaced the Narrative.
Narrative is our primordial tool for sense-making, but in digital information environments narratives are framed by a more immediate experience of the Database. I’m using the term Database loosely to capture how, especially when an event is unfolding, we confront a cacophony of data points (videos, statem... See more
Narrative is our primordial tool for sense-making, but in digital information environments narratives are framed by a more immediate experience of the Database. I’m using the term Database loosely to capture how, especially when an event is unfolding, we confront a cacophony of data points (videos, statem... See more
L. M. Sacasas • Dots Will Be Connected
... See moreStories are tribal propaganda. They control their group, manipulating its members into behaving in ways that benefit it. And it works. A recent study of eighteen hunter-gatherer tribes found almost eighty per cent of their stories contained lessons in how they should behave in their dealings with other people. The groups with the greater proportion
We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more
Jake Orthwein • Why Frame Problems? — Frame Problems
We organise much of our lives around reassuring ourselves about the accuracy of the hallucinated model world inside our skulls.
Will Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different f
... See moreTed Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.
Jonathan Gottschall • The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
... See more…shaped narratives typically focus on the struggles of protagonist, are almost always grounded in some implicit or explicit moral conflict, and ultimately lead not just to an account of what happened but also to an expression of what it all meant. Shaped stories are meaning-making tools and they can exert awesome sway, not just over individual peop
The breakdown in the old agreements about reality is now the most significant reality, and the world can perhaps best be explained in terms of conflicting and often incompatible narratives - Rushdie