Chapter 2: What is Story?
December 2, 2024·29 comments·In Brief
This is Part 3 of a subscriber-only preview of my upcoming book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds. We will release the first five chapters through the end of the year. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2
There are countless ways to describe what a story is and what it does. We might say that a story is a description of a series of things that happened, or else we might say that a story is how we imagine something that might have happened. Joseph Conrad taught us that story is sometimes a public dream and sometimes a private myth. Leo Tolstoy or whomever we decide actually said it reminds us that story boils down to a man going on a journey or a stranger coming to town[i]. Joan Didion embraces story as humanity’s tool to ‘freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.’ All useful definitions, all true.
And yet our purpose in this book is to understand how story springs from and interacts with human consciousness under different conditions. For that reason, I think it is most useful to resolve toward a definition which aligns with how our brain processes and produces story, and also toward how human societies continuously explore, refine, and influence the meaning of those stories. This will also help us to establish a through-line – important for any narrative – between the evolutionary processes and imperatives which predispose us to tell and seek out stories on the one hand, and the technologies like writing or social networks which expose us to them on the other. So what is story?
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