Posts tagged narrative

video link

solarpunks:

The limit(ation)s of literacy: meandering toward a (trans)media ecology of futures

Because, as I point out early in the talk, all futures are narratives, and all futures are thus media(ted). This has important implications for those of us producing futures, with regard to both the processes of (re)production, and the (re)distribution of the resulting product. Per Neil Postman, media are environments, which assign roles and preconfigure possible (and impossible) responses; understanding the affordances various media (and combinations thereof), and the particular ways in which they shape speculative narratives, is therefore vital to futuring as a critical utopian project.

Friend of the blog Paul Graham Raven recently posted his talk from the Futures Brought to Life symposium. 

Its an extremely interesting talk on experiential futures, media literacy, the imagination, narratives etc. well worth your time if you are engaging with solarpunk beyond / deeper than just its surface aesthetic.

“I used to believe that storytelling was the most powerful tool for expression and was therefore frustrated with photography’s limited narrative capacity. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gradually become less enamored with storytelling. These days, I’m not even sure I care that much about expression. Mostly I’m interested in simply paying attention.”

–Alec Soth

In Estonia, we have another trick up in our sleeves: we can use our rich culture of linguistics and mythology as a vehicle for understanding more complex technological issues. For example, in Estonian mythology we have a character called kratt, a creature which has existed in our cultural space for hundreds of years and which is composed of a number of unique features. When the owner acquires from the devil a soul for its kratt (in modern tech talk this mean algorithm), the kratt begins to serve its master. From a communication point of view, the “kratt” narrative is useful because every Estonian knows this story. Kratt’s are something that society understands; AI is something that is complex and difficult to understand. From a technological point of view, the kratt character has exactly the same features as AI. When the Czech writer Čapek invented the word ‘robot’ in 1920 the inspiration came from the Slavic language word ‘robota’ meaning forced labourer. Yes, a robot is something made to fulfil certain tasks, but we can also say that a kratt is a robot with super powers and thus the legal representative rights.

via https://medium.com/e-residency-blog/estonia-starts-public-discussion-legalising-ai–166cb8e34596

It wasn’t until I left broadcasting that I realised how complex and controversial the words ‘story’ and ‘audience’ really were. I called my company ‘Storythings’ for two reasons - one was because I’d been running a conference called The Story for a few years that was pretty much the genesis of the company, and the second was because I was more interested in stories than I was in technology. I’m fascinated by how we tell stories now, and the new relationships we can have with audiences across all sorts of interesting contexts and platforms.

But when I started talking to clients, I was surprised by how those two words - Story and Audience - meant completely different things to different people. Stories seemed to be the hot new idea in marketing, and every brand wanted to know how to tell their story, or to hear their customers’ stories. Transmedia gurus were trying to convince us that stories were many-tentacled hydras, performing complexly choreographed dances to lure fans into their narratives.

But no-one outside of broadcasting really used the word ‘audience’. There were customers, fans, users, subscribers, followers, networks, communities and participants. Audiences were points in a cloud of big data, or a constantly updated Chartbeat report. Audiences were presented as infographics, or studied as psychological experiments.

via https://medium.com/a-brief-history-of-attention/after-the-spike-and-after-the-like–5b78a9f4d1ff

“The idea that we live life in a straight line, like a story, seems to me to be increasingly absurd and, more than anything, a kind of intellectual convenience […] I feel that the events in our lives are like a series of bells being struck and the vibrations spread outwards, affecting everything, our present, and our futures, of course, but our past as well. Everything is changing and vibrating and in flux.”

–Nick Cave

So, while flatpack futures attempt to deliver a whole world, system or universe embedded in one short vignette, lossy futures — be they artifacts, simple scenarios, wireframes of speculation, rich prompts, brief vignettes or some other material object — give us the scaffolding and ask or allow us to determine the details ourselves. In doing so, they transmit the critical data, the minimum viable future, and give us the opportunity to fill in the gaps we think are important to understanding, or have a dialogue around what these gaps may mean. The irony here is that flatpack futures are often high fidelity productions, complex, if flawed, narratives. They are beautiful renderings, but submerge engineering, social, business model, ethical or spiritual problems in favor of presenting a glossy face. Lossy futures are lo-fi, and intentionally omit detail as a feature, not a bug.

via https://medium.com/phase-change/lossy-futures–285e310bbf21

Weaponized narrative seeks to undermine an opponent’s civilization, identity, and will by generating complexity, confusion, and political and social schisms. It can be used tactically, as part of explicit military or geopolitical conflict; or strategically, as a way to reduce, neutralize, and defeat a civilization, state, or organization. Done well, it limits or even eliminates the need for armed force to achieve political and military aims. The efforts to muscle into the affairs of the American presidency, Brexit, the Ukraine, the Baltics, and NATO reflect a shift to a “post-factual” political and cultural environment that is vulnerable to weaponized narrative.

via http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/01/weaponized-narrative-new-battlespace/134284/

Many disputes reflect differences in how people think as much as in what they think about a particular issue. We can’t always persuade one another simply by expressing our positions, introducing information, and counting “pros” and “cons.” Instead, our disagreements often start upstream, so to speak, as we and others diverge in which modes of thinking we consider legitimate. Frameworks for understanding these modes can help us to translate between them, the “story thought” vs. “system thought” framework.

via https://medium.com/quora-design/story-thought-and-system-thought–188dce7a87e6

There are two different angles at play in the discussion about colonialism and science. First is what constitutes scientific epistemology and what its origins are. As a physicist, I was taught that physics began with the Greeks and later Europeans inherited their ideas and expanded on them. In this narrative, people of African descent and others are now relative newcomers to science, and questions of inclusion and diversity in science are related back to “bringing science to underrepresented minority and people of color communities.” The problem with this narrative is that it isn’t true. For example, many of those “Greeks” were actually Egyptians and Mesopotamians under Greek rule. So, even though for the last 500 years or so science has largely been developed by Europeans, the roots of its methodology and epistemology are not European. Science, as scientists understand it, is not fundamentally European in origin. This complicates both racist narratives about people of color and innovation as well as discourse around whether science is fundamentally wedded to Euro-American operating principles of colonialism, imperialism and domination for the purpose of resource extraction.
via https://medium.com/@chanda/decolonising-science-reading-list-339fb773d51f

The user continued to post about topics including Vietnam, Elizabeth Bathory, the Treblinka concentration camp, humpback whales, the Manson Family and LSD, but especially about the inexplicable “flesh interfaces”, being built somehow by shadowy programmes. A Reddit user might chance upon a single one of these posts in one of their ordinary discussion threads, but clicking on the username of _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 would let you view all their posts in aggregate, and there, a compelling science-fiction horror story was beginning to emerge, gradually more beautifully and boldly written from multiple narrative perspectives, but with a common mystery.

via https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/05/9mother9horse9eyes9-the-mysterious-tale-terrifying-reddit

we’ve always said that games are more like cathedrals than they are like movies. It’s a narrative environment, an environment that immerses you in a story, in a time. It’s a time machine. It’s made over hundreds of years.

http://gamechurch.com/everything-exists-nothing-is-impossible-an-interview-with-tale-of-tales-auriea-harvey-and-michael-samyn/

Since the first stirrings of the Nieman Foundation’s narrative writing program nearly 20 years ago, the staff has tended a treasure trove of resource material devoted to excellence in journalistic storytelling. Much of that material went online first via the Nieman Narrative Digest and, in 2009, here at Nieman Storyboard. Storyboard 75 represents some of the most popular posts* from our archive so far.

http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2013/10/03/storyboard–75-the-big-book-of-narrative/

To the problem of narrative collapse, Rushkoff suggests that young people have reacted to the loss of storytellers by realizing they have to become the storyteller. The gamer can write his own next level. We can be fragmented by allowing ourselves to operate on the (non-temporal) time scale of computers or we can program our computers to keep us in sync with our own goals and our own lives. Technology is, in fact, neutral. It doesn’t “want” things to be a certain way. But all technologies are ste up by people with certain biases, but those biases are often unclear until they play out in the real world. So civilians do have an opportunity to intervene in technologies that they dont’t fully understand because they do have the capacity to understand the impact of those technologies on their lives.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/12/22/douglas-rushkoffs-present-shock-the-end-of-time-is-not-the-end-of-the-world/