OCTOBER 2023 – People love a good story. Whether recounting a favorite memory, watching a cinematic masterpiece, devouring the latest best-selling novel, or telling a bedtime story to your kids, stories are significant touchstones in our lives. I’ve always loved stories and aspired to be part of that tradition. Books, movies, theatre, podcasts, campfire oration, the world of art and storytelling have collided for thousands of years. As we head further into the 21st century, I wonder about the medium as it relates to storytelling and which form is the most relevant in the modern era.
Short video clips, podcasts, movies, books, magazines, there are so many ways people search out entertainment and stories these days. I love books, no secret there, but I wonder how broad their appeal is in the always online world we now navigate. From a quick look at yearly book sales figures it seems they are remaining pretty strong, which is fantastic. I would guess that e-books actually help a lot in keeping the written word in the game so to speak.
For me, I welcome opportunities to hold a real book in hand and flip through it’s pages. I spend a lot of time in front of a computer, so it is a welcomed respite to have time away from a screen. No matter the form you enjoy, we can all appreciate quality and novelty, as well as time honored classics. There is a brilliant clip about storytelling from a lecture given by Kurt Vonnegut that I would highly recommend checking out. He brilliantly explains story arcs and how we as humans react to them in the same way as we always have.
I have been thinking about the future a lot lately. Wondering what it is going to be like and how I can play a positive role in it. Which reminds me of the book I snagged this month, ‘The Inevitable’ by Kevin Kelly. In it he writes about the technological developments in production and on the horizon that will have profound impacts on the way we live our lives and the possibilities of tomorrow. It is so tough to put out a book on technology as things move so fast. LLMs were not all the rage when he wrote the book, and I imagine an updated version now would easily be twice the size of the original text, haha. Robotics, artificial intelligence, gene editing, space exploration, fusion energy, there are paradigm shifting technologies on the way that is going to make the world a fantastically different place. So buckle up as it should be an interesting ride! And with it I’m sure numerous new stories to be told from both traditional and artificial intelligence sources alike.
~ CS
