Stories are for sorting and storing
http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/S6D.HTM

> Willard,

>

> The post 29.126 has been niggling at me for days. I originally want to

> reply with a simple observation that the appeal to storytelling is

> cast in such a way to avoid the complications of narration’s relation

> to narrative (the telling and the told; shown and said). But it was

> the theme of “borrowing” from one domain by another that leads me to

> recall a counter-narrative where there is no need to borrow between

> domains since the military-industrial-entertainment complex is one entity.

>

> I contend that fundamental to human interaction is narration:

> attentiveness to how stories are related. Stories are for sorting and

> storing. *Sometimes this soothes paranoia induced by too much

> linearity.*

>

> A while ago (1996), I explored recursivity and narrativity. My

> starting point was the ability to ask questions (and learn from one’s

> bodily reactions). The musings may or may not have military relevance.

> Judge for

> yourselves:

>

> <quote>

>

> Pedagogical situations are sensory. They are also interpersonal.

> Because they are sensory this makes even learning by oneself interpersonal.

> Egocentric speech is like a dialogue between the senses. In

> Vygotsky’s and Luria’s experiments, children placed in problem-solving

> situations that were slightly too difficult for them displayed egocentric speech.

> One could consider these as self-induced metadiscursive moments. The

> self in crisis will disassociate and one’s questionning becomes the

> object of a question.

>

> Not only is the human self as a metabeing both fracturable and

> affiliable in itself, it is also prone to narrativity. That is, the

> human self will project its self-making onto the world in order to

> generate stories from sequences and to break stories into recombinant

> sequences. Its operations on signs are material practices with consequences for world-making.

>

> The fracturable affiliable self calls for reproductive models suitable

> to the interactions of multi-sensate beings, models that render dyads

> dialectical, questionable, answerable. Narrativity understood

> dialectically does not merely mean making sequences or strings of

> events into stories but also stories into things, strung together for

> more stories. From such an understanding, emerge non-dyadic

> narratives of reproduction, narratives where a thing-born transforms

> itself into an event, comes to understand itself as a process.

>

> </quote>

>

> http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/S6D.HTM

>

> Funny to consider that those remarks were based in a consideration of

> language and feedback mechanisms. Make me think that the storytelling

> as “potent form of emotional cueing” may be directed to undesired

> responses such as greater self-reflexivity. And depending on how they

> are parsed, Hollywood films can contribute to undesired responses

> including escape. 🙂

>

> Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large

> http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance

>

> to think is often to sort, to store and to shuffle: humble, embodied

> tasks

>

> On Mon, 29 Jun 2015, Humanist Discussion Group wrote:

>

>>

>>

>>

>>

>> Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, in “The Convergence of the Pentagon and

>> Hollywood” (Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, ed.

>> Rabinovitz and Geil, 2004), describes in some detail the adoption by

>> the U.S. military of the entertainment industry’s storytelling

>> techniques implemented by means of simulation. This chapter follows

>> on from her excellent “Simulating the Unthinkable: Gaming Future War

>> in the 1950s and 1960s”, Social Studies of Science 30.2 (2000). In

>> the 2004 piece she describes a U.S. National Research Council

>> workshop in October 1996 at which representatives from film, video

>> game, entertainment and theme-parks came together with those from the

>> Department of Defense, academia and the defense industries. There is

>> much about this convergence that we might productively take an

>> interest in. Let me, however, highlight storytelling in particular.

>>

>> In a military context, Ghamari-Tabrizi points out, skilled

>> storytelling techniques are used to help participants in a VR

>> environment sense that they are in a real environment and behave

>> accordingly. Storytelling functions as a potent form of emotional

>> cueing that would seem to elicit the desired responses. But

>> especially interesting, I think, is the fact that “many conference

>> participants argued that the preferred mode of experiential immersion

>> in electronic media is not the unframed chaos of hypertext, but

>> old-fashioned storytelling.” She quotes Alex Seiden of Industrial

>> Light and Magic (note the date — 1996): “I’ve never seen a CD-ROM

>> that moved me the way a powerful film has. I’ve never visited a Web

>> page with great emotional impact. I contend that linear narrative is

>> the fundamental art form of humankind: the novel, the play, the film… these are the forms that define our cultural experience.”

>>

>> Comments?

>>

>> Yours,

>> WM

>> —

>> Willard McCarty (http://www.mccarty.org.uk/), Professor, Department of

>> Digital Humanities, King’s College London, and Digital Humanities

>> Research Group, University of Western Sydney

Turning Technophobia through Digital Storytelling

http://www.nmc.org/blog/turning-technophobia-through-digital-storytelling/