duration: 2 hours (3pm - 5pm)
April 28, 2024
What is Storytelling? Is It Important to Humanity?
- stories give meaning to life
- stories are sources of inspiration and awe
- stories can be dangerous and produce chaos within cultural systems, especially when the story sounds like actual reality
- we create a story of our life in order to understand our experiences and how they connect and to express ourselves/inform others of what we have learned
- some stories become so well known that people use them as guides to their behavior and morals
- the practice of storytelling has fallen out of mainstream society, and it is rare to find someone who can tell a truly captivating story
- listening to a story being emotionally spoken directly to you seems to transmit the energy of the story in a way that movies/books cannot, and that is why it was so powerful to hear the speeches of great leaders
- telling a kid a story about why they should not be greedy is much more effective than simply telling them “do not be greedy”
QUESTIONS WITHOUT CLEAR ANSWERS:
- will the art of oral storytelling, face to face, in intimate atmospheres have a place in modern culture again?
- is storytelling a skill or a natural ability?
- is it safer to archive documents (texts, photos, documents, etc) digitally or physically?
RELEVANT MEDIA:
Storytelling is not just entertainment. It's a fundamental part of being human | CBC News
Storytelling has been a core part of humanity for as long as we have existed, before we even knew what a “story” should be. We use stories to understand ourselves and share our experiences with others. They help us to make sense of our reality and inspire us to continue our journey in a meaningful way.
For a long period of history, stories were primarily shared through oral transmissions. Details were easily missed or changed, but stories all the way back thousands of years remain intact today, commonly of religious or philosophical speeches given by great members of society. It is profound to realize how powerful stories can be when we acknowledge how long they have survived throughout centuries of change. We can see how important it is to keep these stories alive as well as the importance of telling our own stories for people in the future to learn from.
Stories can inspire us to do great things, but they can also be a weapon used to turn us against each other, scare us, and instill incorrect beliefs or morals. We must therefore be vigilant about the stories we choose to engage with, and inspect our daily lives for stories we are being brought to believe are reality without even realizing. The modern world is filled with unreliable, bullshit media that tries to steal our attention away from our inner values. Now more than ever it is important to distinguish which tales you trust to guide you and which to ignore. We must also remember that our personal stories can inspire others as well, that we have a power within us to share our experiences in order to help those around us and in the future. Stories have the ability to capture life at a certain moment in time and preserve it forever. We can live through the stories we create long after we pass.
The actual art of storytelling is one that has been lost in our digital world. We have been conditioned to think the best way to tell a story is through writing it down or creating some type of digital media that we can edit to perfection, play or read over and over again. It seems we have forgotten the power of the voice captivated by emotion. Hearing someone speak a story directly to you allows the story to transfer all of the feelings and energy involved to you through their voice. A good storyteller is a choreographer of words, they dance with them through time and space eliciting a beauty and emotion so raw that we cannot help but feel moved in some way. However, it is quite rare to meet someone with this skill in younger generations. We are very good at creating stories on paper or screen, but the skill of storytelling does not have a solid place in our lives anymore.
This article is a story, but it goes much deeper than the words typed here. It begins with a girl alone in her apartment, a stranger in her city, losing the feeling of connection to her world.One night, lying on the floor, she has an idea. Many nights pass, the idea stays. She speaks of it to her friends, her family, it stays put as a construct of her mind but it keeps building itself up to something bigger. Eventually it grows so much that she cannot contain it in her own mind anymore, and so she releases it from her consciousness onto pages of paper and screen. They hold the idea in their spaciousness, becoming more tangible in the form of ink and pixels. The stranger girl shares them with people, prints out flyers and hangs them everywhere she can think of. The idea solidifies, pieces of it coming together slowly. Functionality and structure appear, aspects of reality only available in the mind reveal themselves. Locations, dates, times configured onto the calendars. The idea, Contemplation Club. The moving pieces; the topics, the venues, the people, the time, the means of communication, everything manifested slow and steady. The first meeting is held on the Third of March. The people come and they talk, and they come again the next weekend, and the ones that follow. Faces appear and disappear, new ones coming and others going. 28th of April. 3-5pm, a rainy Sunday. Seven people gather around the table of a room reserved inside of the Perry-Castaneda Library in the heart of Austin, Texas. The topic: what is storytelling? The people discuss, they agree and disagree, they ask each other questions as to what it means. And what does it mean? This. It means that all stories tie into every other story, that each story is a piece of a bigger one, the story of humanity.