Jonathan Gottschall – Christopher Wink

If storytelling is so powerful, then why hasn’t the “storytelling big bang” of social media coincided with “a big bang and harmony and empathy”? Well, it has, but that empathy is for in-groups at the expense of the whole.

Social media can feed us any narrative we want: that we are smart, or behind or, above all else, that we are aggrieved by someone. This isn’t because the social platform companies want this specific outcome exactly. Rather, it’s because algorithms feed us what we want to keep us engaged, which reinforces content creators to create more of that subject matter — all of which is what these platforms do want.

In this way, storytelling is “an essential poison” like oxygen, something we need to live but which when isolated or over-concentrated can kill us. In science, that’s called “the oxygen paradox” which inspired the title of a 2021 book called “The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down” by professor Jonathan Gottschall. Ahead of a conference keynote I gave on “the case for storytelling” for place-based marketers, I recently reread his 2012 book Storytelling Animal, which helped me find this one.

“Story is a mercenary that sells itself is eagerly to the bad guys as the good,” Gottschall writes. They are “influence machines” and so stories aren’t moral; they’re moralistic — they can be used for good and for bad.

Watch a human brain while engaged in a story and that brain looks as if that person is actually experiencing the story, rather than observing it.

That’s why stories are so sticky: why we eavesdrop on other stories, watch movies, listen to music, read novels and gossip. It’s a defining characteristic of humanity.

That’s the thrust of the 2012 book “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human,” written by professor Jonathan Gottschall. Though he argues examples of story’s power shows up all over the place, from effective marketing to biography books and new journalism, this book centers around fiction. Fiction appears better at convincing than nonfiction, exactly because fictional stories put us in a kind of trance, lowering our defenses. How nations and cities, friends and companies, organize are all reliant on stories. (I referenced Gottschall’s work in my recent ‘case for storytelling’ conference speech.)

“Story is the grease and the glue of society,” wrote one psychologist. “Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold”

However the future of fact-based storytelling goes, there appears to be no decline in story in our lives, as disinformation campaigns and bestselling video games both show. As one gamer puts it in the book: “the future looks bleak for reality.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Tag: Jonathan Gottschall

How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down

We are a “storytelling animal”