storytelling

Storytelling and Real-World Violence

February 16, 2015 By Mark 2 Comments

This is the final post in a series exploring the idea that storytelling, gameplay or entertainment of any kind may precipitate acts of violence in the real world. First post here.

In setting out to prevent mass murder as much as humanly possible you have learned a great deal. Most of what you learned will do nothing to keep anyone from being killed, at least for a long while, but you no longer feel confused. It is understandable that people attribute motive to all kinds of things, including mediums of entertainment, and particularly to mediums that feature violence. It is also true that violent entertainment — along with every other aspect of life — may, in some instances, be a contributing factor in murderous mayhem, but it’s equally clear that there will never be any methodology by which such eventualities can be predicted. Even banning the most violent mediums would do nothing to prevent acts of violence from happening because acts of violence have been a part of human history since long before the invention of entertainment technology.

One thing you are convinced of, which you did not believe before, is that stories do play a big part in violence — but not the fictional kind that people usually blame. Narratives are always hard at work in life, including when people go berserk and start killing, but the most dangerous stories do not come from mediums of entertainment, they come from the omnipresent tension between society and the individual mind. They are persistent fictions that people believe in all the time, not just when the telly is on for a couple of hours or a game is played or a movie is streamed. They are beliefs that may even have no basis in reality, yet people are nonetheless convinced those beliefs not only explain how the world works, they unfailingly reveal how the world should be.

One of the most corrosive of these cultural narratives, by far, is the false belief — the protective fiction, endlessly reinforced by the profit-driven press — that we can ever truly know the motive behind any act of madness. Not only does this widely held mistaken belief lead to waste as everyone tries to assign and avoid blame after an act of madness, it perpetuates the false hope that understanding motive in one instance will enable us to predict and prevent acts of violence in the future. Worse, by pretending that the divination of motive can save lives, the real-world benefits of limiting access to the means of violence go largely unreported, and those who might otherwise consider such options remain perpetually misled about the viability of the choices before them. [ Read more ]

Storytelling, Motive and Tony Stewart

August 12, 2014 By Mark Leave a Comment

Over the past weekend, at a dirt track in upstate New York, three-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion Tony Stewart ran over and killed another driver, one lap after the two were involved in an on-track collision. The other driver, twenty-year-old Kevin Ward Jr., climbed out of his car and attempted to confront Stewart when Stewart came back around, at which point Stewart’s car struck and fatally injured Ward.

Because the internet is almost entirely devoted to righteous indignation and ridicule these days, and because media outlets are perpetually poised to profit from the deaths of other human beings, particularly if a celebrity is involved, there has been, as you might expect, a great deal of SEO-driven debate about this tragedy. Unfortunately, even the narrow segment of conversation which has not been fueled by cynicism and exploitation has broken down along predictable lines shaped by diverging presumptions and the reflexive human instinct to convert slim facts into stories that entertain, explain, sell and reassure.

You Don’t Get To Know
What everyone wants to know, and no one will ever know, is whether Tony Stewart hit Kevin Ward Jr. on purpose. That such a possibility exists is abhorrent, but also perfectly in keeping with Stewart’s established record as a hothead if not a bully. Long before last weekend’s race Stewart repeatedly made clear that he had no problem using his fists, helmet or race car as a weapon in on-track disputes — though it should be noted that he’s hardly alone in that approach to his sport. Still, if there was an established meme about Stewart going into that fateful race it was that he routinely converted emotional responses into physical confrontations.

It will never be known what Stewart was thinking before his car hit Ward. Even if Stewart comes forward and answers all such questions in an entirely convincing manner, the most anyone will be able to say is that he was entirely convincing. He might be telling the truth, but he might also be a sociopath with no compunction about lying, or so mortified by what happened that he has repressed the truth of his actions. In any case, because Stewart is alive and Ward is dead the media spotlight will inevitably feature Stewart’s version of events, backed by the full faith and credit of interested corporate entities like NASCAR and ESPN, which have the muscle to force almost any narrative into the mainstream.

If you only manage to keep one thought in your mind about this or any other tragedy that involves questions of motive, try to remember that you will never, ever know what really transpired. Because the moment you believe you do know is the moment when you stop living in the real world and start telling stories.

[ Read more ]

Storytelling and Celebrity

May 14, 2014 By Mark Leave a Comment

Want a nauseating glimpse into how central the exploitation of celebrity is to industrial storytelling? Here are the opening two graphs from a short piece in the New York Times’ theater section:

AMSTERDAM — Over the decades, the story of Anne Frank has been interpreted onstage in varying ways, including a version that some critics describe as too simplistic. Now a new play, simply titled “Anne,” that opened here last week presents a complex portrayal of a teenage girl: sometimes impetuous, spoiled and lonely.

In this multimedia stage production, Anne resents her mother, mocks adults and revels in her emerging sexuality. The new portrait comes nearly 70 years after her death in a German concentration camp, in 1945, and is part of a flurry of efforts by Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss charitable foundation created in 1963 by her father, Otto, to shape her image for the latest generation.

Whoever Anne Frank was as a human being, she was long ago replaced by a brand bearing her name. Whatever she stood for or endured or had done to her, she’s now the narrative equivalent of Indiana Jones, fighting Nazis on our behalf so we won’t ever have to think too hard about where such evil comes from. Fork over your money and absolution awaits. And did you know there’s an animated cartoon in the works?

There are an infinite number of stories that can be told, but why go to all the trouble and risk of doing something new when you can haul out the Anne Frank cookie cutter and put your own spin on a proven box-office winner? Nobody will question your motives for exploiting her memory or profiting from her death, so cut all the deals you can. You know, out of respect.

Anne Franks sells. End of story.

— Mark Barrett

Space and the Storytelling Reflex

April 26, 2014 By Mark Leave a Comment

The picture you see below is a composite image of the Eagle Nebula titled The Pillars of Creation. It was created in 1995 from photographs taken by the Hubble space telescope, and became instantly famous upon its release.

Whether you’ve seen the image before or not, I still remember my initial reaction because I laughed out loud. To see why, take a moment and ask yourself how that image was edited in order to make it so awe inspiring. When you’ve made your best guess — or, if you’re the inattentive type, when you’ve finished reading this sentence — click the link to read on. [ Read more ]

The Uncertainty Principle

April 13, 2014 By Mark Leave a Comment

Following up on the previous post, it’s worth mentioning that while journalism can make use of storytelling techniques and still maintain its ethic, the routine crime committed by for-profit news outlets is the same as that committed by duplicitous authors: exploitation of audience uncertainty. This basic dynamic in communication between two people — one who knows and one who does not know — can be harnessed for good or ill by anyone, which is why the real test of a journalist is whether questions an audience has (or would have if they were more informed) are being answered, or whether audience uncertainty is being fed, led, and otherwise exploited as a means of generating ratings or sales.

Exploiting uncertainty (and its sibling, fear) is the modus operandi not of writers, storytellers and journalists, or even advertisers, attorneys and politicians, who often stoop to that level, but of con artists, propagandists and fear mongers. As a technique uncertainty is commonly generated by entertainers in all mediums precisely because it’s effective, but even then there are standards to such practices. The power of any fiction turns on withheld knowledge because the author could simply reveal all outcomes at the beginning, but as audience members we understand that the best experiences necessitate going along for the ride. What we will not forgive, however, is finding out at the end of a story that the uncertainty at the heart of a work was contrived: that information was withheld from us unfairly or that we were lied to in service of outright deception.

In the case of the missing Malaysian airliner that CNN has been exploiting for profit, simply understanding the context of such a search was and probably still is outside the cognitive capacity of most human beings because the scale of the search area is so vast. While anyone can confront how big an ocean is by going sailing on the high seas — or, alternatively, by looking at a globe and extrapolating — it’s not up to patrons of the news to do this. Rather, it’s up to purveyors of the news to anticipate or detect confusion and uncertainty and work assiduously to defeat it. Doing so, however, obviously shrinks the number of nutso conspiracy theories that can be sourced from the internet and debated by a panel of paid experts. (Here’s one example of how it might be done for web-centric news junkies.)

The test for whether you’re being honest or not in your communications with others is simple: how are you handling audience uncertainty? If you’re authoring a work of fiction, are you being honest in the telling? If you’re a journalist, preying on your audience’s lack of information means, by definition, that you’re not honest. You may get away with it for a while — you may even be able to make an Orwellian career out of misrepresenting yourself as an arbiter of honesty — but you’re still dishonest.

— Mark Barrett

Storytelling and Journalism

April 10, 2014 By Mark 2 Comments

What is the overlap, if any, between storytelling and journalism? Well, that’s a tricky question. There should obviously be no overlap between fiction and journalism, because journalism is concerned with truth. If you profess to be a journalist but your reporting is a lie then at best you’re a propagandist and at worst you’re a fraud.

Storytelling is a murkier issue because the techniques that define storytelling are portable to almost any medium of communication. Not only do fiction writers tell stories but so do we all. Even children relate experiences not in a factual sense but as a narrative, picking and choosing among events, ordering events so they’re more compelling, and embellishing events so they’re more exciting.

It would seem, then, that journalists would be free to exploit storytelling techniques as well, but in fact they’re not — and they’re one of the few professions about which that can categorically be said. If you’re a journalist your first responsibility is to the truth of the facts you’re reporting, not to storytelling techniques that make those facts exciting at the expense of your professional obligations and ethics. (I know, I know, you’re blowing coffee out your nose because you know there are no journalistic ethics any more, but play along anyway.)

Yesterday, in announcing a new slate of programming, CNN’s new chief marketing weasel, Jeff Zucker, had this to say:

CNN President Jeff Zucker called [the new shows] “the foundation of our new prime-time lineup.”

In a statement, Zucker said, “The best journalism is, at its core, great storytelling. We are so pleased to welcome some of the finest storytellers in the business to CNN, the home to this kind of quality programming for more than 30 years.”

Coincidentally, as you may or may not know, for the past month CNN has been ruthlessly and brazenly exploiting the unsolved disappearance of a Malaysian airliner for the express purpose of making money. Using every storytelling trick in the book, including some of the most childish means of fostering speculation, morbid curiosity and lunatic thinking, CNN and its cast of purported journalists has turned an ongoing news event into an obsessive pursuit aimed not at the truth of the airplane’s disappearance, but at generating cash from the corpses of several hundred human beings.

Is that storytelling? Probably. Is that journalism? Not hardly.

Whatever CNN used to be, it’s noble heart died long ago. What’s left is not only an embarrassment to journalism as a profession, it’s an embarrassment to every storytelling profession as well. On the other hand, if you want to know how to make yourself rich off of other people’s tragedies, it’s easily the best example going.

— Mark Barrett

Mediums and the Power of Rules

November 8, 2012 By Mark 1 Comment

Like stories, sports are not simply constrained by rules, they are defined by them. What we enjoy and take from sports after the fact is, for the most part, a narrative almost indistinguishable from fictional ones we create or are entertained by, but because sports usually play out in real time the rules are inevitably more obvious to the audience. In recognition of the importance of rules, sports almost always feature officials who are charged with enforcing those rules, albeit as inconspicuously as possible. Without officials, most sports would descend into chaos in short order — as still happens from time time.

I’ve noted previously that even a simple rule change can have a big effect on the narrative of a sport. Three years ago the National Basketball Association decided to officially adopt a rule that had been in practical use for years. This new rule gave players with the ball the right to take two full steps without dribbling — which, given the stride-length of many NBA players, effectively allowed them to go from the perimeter to the basket without putting the ball on the floor. This, in turn, has had a commensurate positive effect on scoring, which the audience enjoys.

This year the NBA instituted a new rule about so-called flopping — the intentional faking of a foul so as to cause officials to charge the opposing player with an infraction that player did not in fact commit. The new rule is designed to punish players who routinely flop, a move necessitated by the fact that flopping has eroded the integrity of the game and the authority of NBA officials. (Even though there are three officials covering each NBA game the players know those officials can’t see everything. Fans and the media, however, often have clear evidence of a flop, particularly when an instant replay is shown. No sport can survive that kind of routine and objective breakdown at the officiating level, as waning public interest in Major League Baseball’s arbitrary and often incompetent officiating continues to demonstrate.)

In the past year I also commented on the fact that the NFL had to change a few existing rules that were eroding the appeal of its product. Specifically, the time-honored tradition of allowing defensive players to physically cripple offensive players had to be revised because of new evidence that all those “great hits” were leading to things like “brain damage” and “slow, agonizing, premature death” after players retired. While these rule changes were made in part to minimize the amount of money the league will inevitably have to to pay for crippling and killing its own employees, the changes were also necessary to protect the audience from feeling queasy about enjoying what had become undeniable if not unconscionable brutality. Even in this example, however, where outside information (medical data) intruded on the sport, all it took to solve the problem and support the medium were simple changes in the rules.

Now, contrast the above examples with what the NFL did at the beginning of the 2012-2013 season, because what the league did then affected the medium of sports itself, yet nobody at the time had any inkling of what that portended. Let me repeat that. Despite decades of experience working in or covering professional sports, all of the people who caused the problem, and all of the people in the media who commented on the problem, had no understanding of what was happening even as events unfolded week by week. [ Read more ]

Mediums and Authorial Control

October 28, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

The rules that define any medium at any particular point in time may vary in complexity, but they are still binding. If the medium you’re playing around in is space travel, you should probably pay strict attention to the rules we call the laws of physics. On the other hand if the medium you’re playing around in is abstract sculpture, you can pretty much do anything you want as long as it ends up being a physical object — or, if your intended audience is purely intellectual or academic, some non-physical or negative-space meta-commentary on physical objects. If you try to present an action painting as sculpture, however, you’re probably going to get confused looks, if not some serious push-back.

The tendency over time is for all mediums to become more plastic. Rules that were previously assumed to be inviolate are challenged by artists and craftspeople who chafe at those limitations, until ultimately all non-essential rules are pared away to reveal the bedrock foundation of the medium itself. Like sculpture, a painting is defined today simply as any application of paint to canvas, board or wall. It doesn’t matter whether a painting is abstract or representational: all that matters is that the materials being used are paint or some paint equivalent, but that clearly wasn’t always the case. This creative freedom for painters was hard-won over centuries, with each subsequent school balking at restrictions imposed by those who came before, until, ultimately, all rules of what defines a painting were abandoned in favor of unbridled creativity.

And yet, as with sculpture, rules still apply no matter how plastic a medium becomes. If what you call a painting is in fact a pumpkin sitting in a field then you’re objectively wrong. You can do anything you want with paint, you can paint anything you want, or paint on anything you want, but without paint (or its equivalent) you don’t have a painting.

Compared to painting, storytelling as a medium — even in the rarefied air of experimental literature — is and will always remain constrained by complex rules. Some of these rules are a result of the way human brains take in and process narrative information. Some are cultural rules that define the meaning of objects and people and places before they are redefined or repurposed by authors. Some are logical rules having to do with time and place and order, which can only be broken when some plausible new rule (time travel, say) replaces the assumed rules so the reader does not become lost. And there are of course rules defined by language.

When authors say of literature that there are no rules, what they mean is that you can write about anything in any manner you see fit, as long as it pays off in the way you intend. If you see a literary objective and you need to break a specific rule to reach that goal you’re allowed to do it. What you’re not allowed to do is put ten thousand words in a blender, hit puree, and call that a story, or literature, or even a dictionary mash-up. If you do that with paint people may actually pay you for the result if you spew it on a canvas or sell it in gallon cans, but nobody is going to pay you for pureed words.

— Mark Barrett

Storytelling and the Power of Mediums

October 22, 2012 By Mark 2 Comments

I can’t tell you where my own impetus to author stories comes from. I know it’s there because I feel it, but I quit speculating about the cognitive roots long ago. Time ticks by and thoughts come to me, some of which I shape and express, but I don’t know where they originate, or even how they become coupled with sufficient desire and conviction that I choose to act on them. I’m glad this happens, but I don’t control it.

I do know that the idea of creating something from nothing has enormous appeal to me. I still remember being a very young boy and looking at a blank sheet of paper and a newly-sharpened number-two pencil and thinking to myself that what I was looking at was infinite possibility. With only those two things I could create something that would change the world or make people laugh or cry, and I’m still amazed by that.

But there’s another aspect to creation that can’t be overlooked, and that’s the issue of control. Very few people who menace a piece of paper with a pencil, or a canvas with a brush, or the world with a lens, do so with the intent of letting someone else control that process. Depending on the scale of the enterprise and the psychological make-up of the creator(s) the stakes may seem inconsequential or soul-destroying, but it’s axiomatic that in exchange for authority (if not also autonomy) each creator assumes responsibility for the final result. And that’s true even if chaos is your preferred method of creation.

[ Read more ]

The Long View in Context

September 21, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Following up on the previous post, I think it’s worth taking a moment to consider where we are as a culture, and how we might evolve in the future relative to independent authorship and self-publishing.

The current explosion of interest in self-publishing is being driven by a number of factors, not all of them constant. I believe that as long as the internet exists, people will use it to reach out to each other without engaging the services of middlemen and gatekeepers. That goes for everything from private conversations to business — meaning, ultimately, that every attempt to mediate those direct connections will ultimately fail, if only to inevitably be reborn in some slick new guise. Whether we’re talking about sites like Facebook or device manufacturers like Apple, they’re all simply along for the ride, even as they purport to be driving the revolution.

What’s important to remember with regard to self-publishing is that what we are witnessing today is the explosive origin of what will be a future norm. As such there’s a built-in, pent-up demand for this new opportunity that simply won’t exist in the future. It’s not just kids or hipsters who are learning how to use the internet to do things like self-publish books, it’s everybody, all at once. In a generation or two, however, it really will be only the kids who need to be taught. Like young drivers they’ll learn at a developmentally appropriate age how to use the same self-publishing tools their older siblings, parents and grandparents have been using most of their lives.

Today there are clearly a lot of people who have always wanted to self-publish a book or two. Whether those books are collections of family recipes or deranged manifestos, until now these personal works have been financially and technologically beyond the reach of most would-be authors. This pent-up demand, again, crosses all generations, but over time — and perhaps a relatively short amount of time — that demand is going to be flushed out. Yes, there will be people who decide to pursue self-publication either as a hobby or avocation, but most would-be self-publishers will produce the titles they’ve always wanted and then stop. Or they’ll hang out a shingle and try to make a few bucks helping other independent authors realize their own pent-up dreams.

It’s also important to note that there’s a perfect convergence right now between the availability of self-publishing and the amount of time people have on their hands. If you crater the economy and drive millions of people into unemployment, they’re going to look around for something to do. If they’ve always wanted to self-publish a book they now have the time, and can probably afford to get it done. They may even have extra motivation to explore self-publishing as a means of making a buck or two when a couple of extra bucks would really be handy.

For these reasons, then, I think the current avalanche of demand for and interest in self-publishing will necessarily decrease — perhaps quite precipitously — as people find more time-consuming and remunerative pursuits, and as pent-up demand becomes satisfied over time. Which means those writers who are determined to take the long view, both in terms of future works and the value or present works, will almost certainly find themselves in a less-crowded market in the future. Which strikes me as a very good place to be.

— Mark Barrett