John Hagel - at Edge Perspectives with John Hagel - blogs on the human need for narrative and our collective need to create new, healthier narratives for our future.
Hagel also blogs at the Edge Perspectives site, and he is the author of The Power of Pull.
The Pull of Narrative – In Search of Persistent Context
We live in a world of ever more change and choice, a world where we have far more opportunity than ever to achieve our potential. That kind of world is enormously exciting, and full of options. But it is also highly disorienting, threatening to overwhelm us with sensory and mental overload.
In that kind of world, the ability to provide persistent context becomes paradoxically ever more valuable. Persistent context helps to orient us and connect us in ways that can accelerate our efforts to achieve our potential.
Content versus context
In our digital world, content providers progressively chunk up their offerings to provide more choice and easier access. Music is now available by the track rather than packaged onto a CD. Sure, we will continue to watch movies and TV programs on our digital devices, but increasingly we consume video in bite-sized chunks – the preferred length of a YouTube video is 2 – 5 minutes. As for text, it has been progressively deconstructed from books to articles to blog postings to 140 character tweets.
As this occurs, value moves from content to context. In the old days, context came in various forms. It came in the package that delivered the content (you often could judge a book by its cover) or, even more broadly, it came from the stable surroundings that produced the content. We had familiarity with the institutions and societies that generated the content. As our world fragments and changes ever more rapidly, we find that context cannot be taken for granted – it must be defined.
We have already seen a growing emphasis on experience as an important element of context. Stories have become increasingly important to provide even broader context. We are now on the cusp of a revival of narrative as an even more valuable context.
The context trajectory – from experiences to stories to narratives
What is the context trajectory here? Experience is content specific and static – it generally ends when the interaction with the content ends. Stories add a more dynamic element – they position specific content within a flow of events but these events typically have a beginning, middle and end. Stories unfold over a defined period of time.
Stories and narratives are often used interchangeably, as synonyms. But here I will draw a crucial distinction between the two. Narratives, at least in the way I will be using them, are stories that do not end – they persist indefinitely. They invite, even demand, action by participants and they reach out to embrace as many participants as possible. They are continuously unfolding, being shaped and filled in by the participants. In this way, they amplify the dynamic component of stories, both in terms of time and scope of participation. Stories are about plots and action while narratives are about people and potential.
Read the whole post - this is good stuff.
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