“Another Fine Mess”: The Condition of Storytelling in the Digital Age

Abstract

Storytelling is by its very nature a messy business. Over the past decade or so it has got a whole lot messier.In his book After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (2004), John Law calls upon his fellow sociologists to abandon their loyalty to the notion of the single scientific truth and its associated methodologies and ways of interpreting the world and instead to embrace a vague, difffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct Weltanschauung (2), whose multiple and often contradictory truths play out alongside each other in our individual and collective lives:No doubt some things in the world can indeed be made clear and definite. Income distributions, global CO2 emissions, the boundaries of nation states, and terms of trade, these are the kind of provisionally stable realities that social and natural science deal with more or less effectively. But alongside such phenomena the world is also textured in quite different ways. (Law 2)Law perceives this texture as and, writing as he is in response to a particular crisis in sociology, suggests that social scientists need to accommodate messiness in their thinking. Narrative scholars have long since embraced mess, and storyteller-practitioners understand their discipline as being the ultimate in messiness, embracing these two seemingly contradictory properties:1. To be messy in and of itself.2. To enable meaning making and clarity where mess exists. Mess to deal with mess.I am using in storytelling here to primarily describe a range of multiplicities (multiplicities of forms, of media, of perspectives, of truths, of meanings, of texts, of relationships) and also storytelling's temporary nature, whereby stories resist definition and documentation. Stories live in the moment. One might even say that they perform the moment and then are gone, only to reconstruct themselves and reappear for the new moment, the new context.What has really messed up storytelling in recent years is the digital revolution. I say so-called because digital revolution is arguably an overused and much contested term, but we can perhaps agree that the evolution of web-based technologies and their increased affordability for the broad population, at least inWestern capitalist democracies (recent surveys in the United Kingdom suggest that access to the Internet is perceived by the majority as a basic utility and right, in the same way as access to water, light, and heat is), has transformed the way we conduct many aspects of our social and civic lives, from shopping and banking to dealing with government departments and even the ability to work from home. In particular, the arrival of social media platforms has had a game-changing impact on the way we conduct one of our most basic and fundamental human social actions: the telling of stories. Our lives have become even more complex and messier than before.We are no longer restricted to telling or listening to stories through interactions with our friends, family, colleagues, and representatives of authority (for example, police, lawyers, doctors, priests, bosses, and such). In the past these interactions would have mostly taken place in real-time, face-to-face, co-present situations and occasionally over the telephone or by letter. Unless we had the literary ability or financial capability to be published, these would have been largely the restrictions placed upon our narrative lives. Nowadays, however, we are all publishers and with a few clicks of the mouse or swipes of the finger we are able to share our stories with people we have never met, nor are likely ever to meet, from places we have never been to, nor are ever likely to visit, and to hear their stories in return, without the need of a mediating author, editor, or journalist.I am not suggesting that in the midst of the digital revolution we have abandoned our traditional storytelling practices. …