It’s all about story.
That short sentence sums up what’s believed to make for good communications today.
This maxim is applied to everything from popular entertainment, business and academia, to the (high) arts. According to scholar Christian Salmon, the cultural obsession with storytelling started back in the 90s and became an unquestioned “best practice” with the explosion of the web. Today, as he notes, terms like “narrative branding” and “storytelling management” have become part of job descriptions.
The rationale behind the trend, of course, is that storytelling touches on something deep in human nature. The cave people did it, we’re told. Stories go deeper than the so-called “rational mind” (that we’ve been trained to despise as phony), sinking beneath it, touching something more “real.”
I’ve wondered about storytelling a lot myself. In my work as a freelance copywriter (or “content provider”, as this job is now called today), I have, in fact, marketed my own skills as a professional “storyteller” quite aggressively.
What strikes me about this trend is that while a lot has been written about its upside, there’s not much out there about the potential dangers of getting swept up in a narrative, especially one that is not your own. John Scalzi’s Hugo award winning science fiction novel, Redshirts, can be read as a witty critique of our "storied" culture.
The book takes the viewpoint of the rank and file crew members on a space exploration voyage. After participating in a number of dangerous missions, they notice that the elite officers who lead these expeditions (a group of five or so prominent characters) always make it back alive, while they, the enlisted orders, tend to get knocked off.
This unequal distribution of risk is not just the result of the prototypical class war between officers and crew. A character named Jenkins discovers that somehow, “a fictional television show intrudes on our reality and warps it.” The reason the top five officers don’t get killed is because they are this TV show’s main characters. The crew, meanwhile, is expendable — just like movie extras, or “redshirts”, as they are called by fans of the old Star Trek Series.
Characters who accept what’s called “The Narrative” without question end up getting killed. This is because “The Narrative” not only puts them in ridiculously dangerous situations — it even impairs their thinking capabilities. When “The Narrative” takes over, things quit making sense”, Scalzi writes, and…
“People stop thinking logically and start thinking dramatically. ‘The Narrative’—Jenkins’ term for when the television show crept into their lives, swept away rationality and physical laws and made people know, do and say things they wouldn’t otherwise. You’ve had it happen to you already, Jenkins had said. A fact you didn’t know before just pops into your head. You make a decision or take an action you wouldn’t otherwise make. It’s like an irresistible impulse because it is an irresistible impulse—your will isn’t your own, you’re just a pawn for a writer to move around.”
The danger of buying into popular narratives, as Redshirts illustrates, is that the interests of the people telling the tales sometimes don’t coincide with those of the players in the drama.
Popular wisdom recognizes this fact. In the business world, when some new motivational narrative comes down from management, it’s common for the rank and file to talk about the dangers of “drinking the Koolaid.” Or think of those war movies in which the soldiers who are most gung-ho often end up getting themselves and their crew killed.
But what fascinates me most about Redshirts is how it shows that once narratives get inside you, so to speak, they can change both your thinking and perception of physical reality.
The story that changed taste buds
Marketing guru Seth Godin illustrates how this process happens on a more mundane level. He shows how a story changed the way wine tasted, even for the most discerning drinkers. In his classic All Marketers Are Liars Tell Stories, he describes the success of a manufacturer of wine glasses, George Riedel.
Riedel, Godin tells us, is a “tenth-generation glass blower”, “an artisan pursuing an age-old craft”, who believes that the shape of a glass dramatically affects the taste of the wine. There is a poetry to the way Riedel’s brand tells this story. Godin remarks:
“According to Riedel’s Web site: ‘The delivery of a wine’s ‘message,’ its bouquet and taste, depends on the form of the glass. It is the responsibility of a glass to convey the wine’s messages in the best manner to the human senses.’”
Riedel’s story convinced connoisseurs. Robert Parker, “the king of wine reviewers” was sold on the taste-shaping power of the product, remarking: “The effect of these glasses on fine wine is profound. I cannot emphasize enough what a difference they make.”
What happens when such glasses are tested scientifically? Godin comments:
“And yet when the proper tests are done scientifically — double-blind tests that eliminate any chance that the subject would know the shape of the glass — there is absolutely zero detectable difference between glasses. A $1 glass and a $20 glass deliver precisely the same impact on wine: none.”
Rewriting the narrative
Our current political climate is thick with narratives, many of which, if believed, can result in great danger. Think of the stories told about how gun regulation and background checks threaten the American tradition of freedom and individualism. Or the tall tale about how climate change is an exaggeration by nutty, doomsday, leftist scientists.
One way to fight such narratives is the way Scalzi’s characters do. They find a way to seize control of the story themselves — and revise it, so they don’t get whacked.
