Showing posts with label Storytelling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Storytelling. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Friday, April 05, 2013
Thursday, December 06, 2012
Monday, October 22, 2012
Friday, August 17, 2012
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Monday, May 07, 2012
The Storytelling Animal
Stories can change our behavior. They can influence our perceptions. They may even have the potential to, quite literally, change the flow of history—or at least some parts of it.
A conversation with Jonathan Gottschall, care of Scientific American...
MK: You talk about the fine line between creativity and insanity. How do we keep our storytelling in check, so that it is a productive and not a destructive force in our lives?
JG: The human mind is addicted to stories. We make them up all time, and we can easily be taken in by them. Once we latch on to a story (be it a religious narrative or a conspiracy theory) it’s hard to give it up. So we need to be wary of the power of story. But, on the other hand, a little fiction can be a good thing. Take our own life stories. We all have a story that we tell about ourselves—about who we are, what our formative experiences were, and what our lives mean. But psychologists have shown that these stories aren’t very trustworthy. They are based on distorted memories and wildly optimistic assessments of our own qualities. Yet, crafting these stories—and believing them—seems to be preserve our mental health. People who don’t overrate their own personal qualities tend to get depressed. So the little fictions we make up about ourselves are healthy, so long as they don’t cross over into narcissistic travesty.
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Friday, March 11, 2011
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
From "Once Upon a Time" to "Happily Ever After"
Fairy tale scholars are taking a keen look at the history of the genre. The Chronicle of Higher Education has the story.
From the piece...
Long long ago, villagers and nursemaids spun stories, handing them down from generation to generation. Then collectors like the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault came along, jotted them down, and transformed them into literature.
That's one old story line about fairy tales. To hear Ruth B. Bottigheimer tell it, that story is itself a fairy tale.
"It has been said so often that the folk invented and disseminated fairy tales that this assumption has become an unquestioned proposition," Bottigheimer writes in the introduction to her most recent book, Fairy Tales: A New History (State University of New York Press, 2009). "It may therefore surprise readers that folk invention and transmission of fairy tales has no basis in verifiable fact. Literary analysis undermines it, literary history rejects it, social history repudiates it, and publishing history ... contradicts it."
Her claim is the latest chapter in — some say it should be the epilogue to — a clash almost as old as fairy tales themselves. For many scholars, the debate over where fairy tales came from is a battle that belongs to the late 19th century, when national folklore societies sprang up in the United States and Britain and established the importance of oral traditions.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
The Importance of Story
In the Arcade Journal (Architecture and Design in the Northwest) Lynn Casey discusses the importance of stories.
From the article:
Stories have been with us from the beginning of time, and for good reason. They add substance to the challenges of everyday life, enthrall us with the range of human experience, and add texture to the objects that fill our days. So what happens in this brave new world of Web 2.0 — where the economy of a place called Second Life outpaces that of many small European nations? Is there any value to provenance, to craft, to the individual design?
The Internet has created a vast shopping emporium, allowing consumers endless selection and an incredible variety of price points. As digital commerce and communication continue to flourish and the simple commerce of vendor and buyer becomes reduced to bits on a chip, a vacuum has been created. Real touch, real time is becoming scarce — and we all know scarcity begets desire. The critical motivation for choice of non-commodity items is now one of relationship. Those vendors who can imbue their products with story and feed the hunger in the coming generations for history and connection will thrive.
Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, believes that the future belongs to those who can tell a story through their art, their work and their lives. He says: The era of "left brain" dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which "right brain" qualities — inventiveness, empathy, and meaning — predominate. The challenge lies in revealing the inspiration and passion that leads us to create meaningful art and design and then translating that into relevance for the consumer.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
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