Collective Narrative Week 1: Response to Reading

In the readings, Schank makes two claims about storytelling:

1. We tell stories to achieve certain goals (me-goals, you-goals, and conversational goals).

2. We only understand other people’s stories in relation of our own personal stories.

The second claim is more interesting to me. It implies that we can only hope to understand stories of people with different experiences from us only in abstract, brushing away details to distill the stories in a way we can match to our own experiences.

Whereas Schank’s focus seems to be stories that can be told in the context of a single conversation, I’m more interested in stories that could take days, or even months, or years, to be told. I’m thinking specifically of projects like @RealTimeWWII, which live-tweets the events of World War II day by day. For me, this ambient, long-duration storytelling has the potential to break through the barrier of empathy that Schank identifies, by helping the audience slowly ease into the alternate world they are being presented with.