About
Just Tell Me a Story explores shifting identities, narrative manipulation, narrative selection and narrative preferences; all creating an ocean of distorted news and misinformation we now have to swim or drown in. Digital and algorithmic influence provide the thematic drumbeat to the overall image of the ship of reality colliding with a reef of sometimes deliberately tangled narratives. A collision that damages and distorts reality itself.
We appear to be transforming ourselves into societies where there are no absolute facts or truths just versions. The versions that stick become the facts du jour. We have a whole professional and political class now devoted to crafting and spinning such versions and in that world the masseur or bender of truth is considered an object of respect, if not outright admiration. Versions that succeed in reaching their target will invariably be coated in the emotional glue necessary to fix it in place long enough to have the desired effect on thinking and behaviour, e.g. voting.
We humans appear to have a propensity to bend facts to fit our ideas instead of vice versa. Feelings now trump facts and superstition trumps rationalism. Or a Trump trumps rationalism and reality. Or a my truth trumps anyone else’s truth. We individuals can do this but so do whole nations when they craft more palatable versions of their history or cloak themselves in a fog of official oblivion. Indeed history is always written by the winners and winners always have power. And those in power want to hear only the stories they want to hear and they can therefore create and modify the records, and so create and, if necessary, modify the histories.
History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past (AJP Taylor, 1906-1990).
History or a desired version of history (ersatz history) is of interest (if at all) only where it can be employed to affect the interests of those who would influence the shape of the present. Those interests may be naive, benign or malign and may in turn be influenced by interests with other longer term goals, e.g undermine confidence, embed concept of historical guilt and ongoing repentance, foment conflict and spread political instability. (quoted from an essay ‘Empire is Never Black and White But Decolonisers Just Won’t See It’ by Nigel Biggar’ in Times, London, 21Jan 2023 extracted from his book ‘Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning’)
History is no antidote to the resistance and persistence of human folly. Folly is a collective misadventure that itself drives history. It is the pursuit of policies contrary to self interest even when there are viable alternative courses of action presented and reasoned challenges made by contemporaries against the ‘wooden-headedness’ being committed. Unheeded warnings and missed opportunities jostle with venal/incompetent advisers, prophets and mad kings (see The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman, 1984)
Today’s debates ‘have reached a new and dangerous level’ as ‘the story of the past is turned into an exercise of moral disapproval, and judgment is passed on figures such as Francis Drake and Horatio Nelson according to the ethical criteria espoused by…. a very loud [minority]. (David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at University of Cambridge, in History, Whose History? The Battle for the School Curriculum, Politeia, 2023)
But what of those without power? They have always left little trace. But surely in these days of mobile devices, ubiquitous internet, and social networking the ‘ordinary’ people’s stories will contribute to history? Nice thought. But even more unlikely than in the past. Why? Because we have now constructed the perfect environment for ephemeral communication and, as countries like China have demonstrated, also for monitoring and control. As regards ephemera, we can now craft our thoughts, words and images in the digital equivalent of ice cubes which can readily melt to water and drain away. We well may make frequent use our of X/Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tik Tok, or whatever is the social networking platform du jour but transience, and inevitable decay, is inevitable in such user-generated digital content platforms.
As well the ephemeral nature of today’s digital content with its built-in obsolescence the very technologies and platforms delivering said content will eventually cease to exist or be replaced by something faster, more shiny or ‘better’; and the content within abandoned or actively erased. For example, there was a time before Google where Alta Vista, Lycos and Yahoo were significant influences on the ‘world wide web’. So, in 10-20 years time perhaps some variant or mutation of ChatGPT will have digested Google’s breakfast. Leaving just a few online archives to preserve and present a subset of what our digital ancestors thought, or were interested in. Cassette tape, Betamax, VHS, CDROM, DVD, memory cards, USB drives all were, or are, the media of the moment and each has, or will be, replaced. Consequently, all that content and data once considered so important slowly degrades in household drawers or municipal landfills.
Consider, also, that each online service or site exists only as long as long as the bill for hosting it is paid, and as long as the hosting service itself continues to exist. At the individual level even years of output by an individual online author can can disappear overnight if through ill-health or death the hosting fees are not met. Even content rich and popular sites are vulnerable to the vagaries of the marketplace, e.g. hosting company takeovers or buy-outs, and government or hosting company policy changes.
Putting ink on paper as the primary means of societal communication and record keeping appears to be fast receding in the rear-view mirror. Yet paper has the advantage of an inbuilt longevity and resilience that we have not yet achieved in the digital world. Indeed, far from increasing our resilience, our almost total dependence now on live online services makes our societies incredibly vulnerable to total and rapid disruption through lack of access to digital information, e.g. bank accounts, payments, contacts, contracts, appointments, health, travel, logistics. Anyone trying to pay for shopping in a supermarket when the card payments system has failed and they are carrying no cash will know what, even temporary, failure of the online payments system feels like. The move to a cashless society pursued by some governments and embraced by many of their citizens is a society instantly rendered helpless when its energy or communications infrastructure becomes compromised for whatever reason.
But assuming our digital world somehow manages to continue its remorseless march it is important to address the impacts it is having on our thinking and behaviour. The basic thrust of Just Tell Me a Story is that as social animals we are hardwired to like stories, albeit we have our individual preferences for how these stories are delivered. But we also have a propensity for stories that align with our existing expectations and biases. It is that which makes us vulnerable to charismatic or articulate storytellers who can amplify feelings to a degree that sometimes suppresses our more rational selves. To put in more alliteratively:
Detail is drowned in a deluge of disrupting delusional dross disguised as data. Festering flibbertigibbet finds feelings to ferment and focus so that the fooled then forward falsehoods as facts (Dada de Dada).
Samuel Taylor Colleridge (1772-1834) the English poet and philosopher is attributed with saying:
All great fiction depends on the willing suspension of disbelief
He also referred to this propensity towards abandoning critical thinking and logic as ‘poetic faith’ or a transient belief in the supernatural. The transient was perhaps also transactional in that the reader or viewer bought into the story and its characters only for the duration of the ‘performance’. The context and environment of course was all important since it was then that the conditions were set for such willing but temporary suspensions. A book’s author setting the conditions within the readers mind. Or the theatre. Or the opera. Or the cinema. Or the television. Or Twitter/X? Or TikTok?
Coleridge was concerned with fictional worlds and the limited vehicles for creating them of his time. He could not have imagined the almost unlimited potential for creating stories and suspending reality that exist today. Or more accurately creating different versions of reality to a degree of plausability that differentiating what is fiction and what is real can sometimes be very challenging.
And what happens when the suspending reality ceases to be a transient suspension? We can now lock ourselves in some chosen social media silo that keeps echoing the fictions but tells us they are facts; or at least the ‘truth of the day’. Or the silos recast those we once thought heroes or heroines into villains because their stories no longer align with the zeitgeist of this time. These former heroes can now so easily be harassed, expunged and ‘cancelled’. Such defenestrations of the living or the dead heroes are precipitated, usually, by a social media feeding frenzy (‘pile ons’) catalysed by so-called ‘influencers’ or what I have referred to in a previous post as articulate sharks. Alternatively, their heroic stories are altered to fit the desired new version of history. Hence the lines in the verse:
Today I’m a hero, tomorrow recast
Now I’m a villain, reshape my past
Thus we have truly entered The Matrix. Which I think was fiction. Wasn’t it?
I explore the theme of our vulnerabilities to a good ‘story’ and a ‘good’ storyteller in more depth in other poetic or musical posts, e.g. Sauron’s Gaze or Freedom’s Dark Mirror or Articulate Shark or In Their Minds v2 or In Their Minds v1 or Truth Dies or The Beast of Expectation. I invite you to read/listen to them as well.
