From the Island of Misfit Story Ideas: Universal Story Translator

(This is the first in a series of posts on misfit ideas for helping people work with stories. I think they have potential, but they have not yet found anyone who wants to fund their completion. I'm posting them here to see if they can find good homes with people who need them.)

The idea of a universal story translator came about around 1999 when I was at IBM Research working with John C. Thomas. It wasn't any one person's idea but arose in conversation, as far as I recall. The question we posed then was:

What would make any story, told anywhere, at any time, understandable to anyone else, anywhere and at any time?

The idea links in my mind to four things:

1. The plaques on the Pioneer spacecraft that announced our form and intelligence to other life forms;
2. the universal translator on Star Trek and elsewhere;
3. the Darmok episode of Star Trek, which addresses the issue of cultural structures far above the level of language, specifically metaphor and story; and
4. the footnotes on old novels that explain things such as why "He lived in a wooden house" is a put-down rather than a simple description. (Actually, that isn't in the footnotes in old Russian novels, but eventually I figured it out. I've noticed that the level of detail in footnotes corresponds to the year of publication; some things that were obvious in 1920 aren't so obvious today.)

In each of these cases context annotates content so that the content can be better understood. The first is minimal; the second fanciful; the third a near failure; and the fourth only a partial success. The reason this matters is that, as I said back in the first of my eight observation posts, most projects that involve helping people work with stories involve the paradoxical elements of narrative compression (which requires context trimming) and narrative distance (which requires context for translation). Manipulating the interplay and tension between compression and distance is important to maximizing the utility of story projects.

This is the sort of thing I'm talking about: on this site, the students of Copper Giloth at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have created traditional and modern versions of many of Aesop's fables, exchanging the troubles of foxes and birds for the dilemmas of today's young people. The fox invites the stork to a baseball game; belling the cat is starting a neighborhood watch; sour grapes are a potential girlfriend. This is a perfect example of narrative translation and shows the potential of the idea, which could go much further.

Consider for example the division between city residents, usually immigrants, who butcher livestock in their back yards and residents who have their butchering done by others in remote locations. Each has a story to tell, but important elements of context are left behind, and the gaps are filled by assumptions on each side.

Our original work on this idea revolved around tools that might give people easier ways to annotate and view stories with contextual information added, to make what is unsaid in the story explicit. At the time I built a very simple Flash prototype to play with the ideas, which simply displayed some "canned" contextual notes I had added to a fable from Aesop. I've tried to duplicate it here using the "title" attributes of links. The links go right back to this post, so don't click on them, but if you hover over them you should be able to read the annotations.

A shepherd once found the whelp of a Wolf and brought it up, and after a while taught it to steal lambs from the neighboring flocks. The Wolf, having shown himself an apt pupil, said to the Shepherd, "Since you have taught me to steal, you must keep a sharp lookout, or you will lose some of your own flock."

From playing with this idea I learned a few things.

1. The process of adding context annotations is both difficult and useful. Both attributes are important, and neither can be taken away by automation without losing something. It's difficult because it's hard to see context when you are in it, and it's useful because you find out things you had not realized about the story by forcing yourself to make context explicit. This less obvious utility complements the more obvious utility of communicating context to story readers.
2. The technological part of the task is much the smaller one, and we already have the tools we need to do it. Everything is hyperlinked today, and with services like diigo, adding "sticky notes" to content is easy. At this point it's more about habits, social cues, and group techniques than anything to do with technology.

Full realization

If the idea of a universal story translator was to be made fully real, it would be a set of ideas and techniques people would use for several context-requiring purposes, including:

• conflict resolution - helping groups understand each other
• international understanding - helping people understand and appreciate other cultures
• group sensemaking - helping people surface hidden assumptions
• persuasive communication - helping people reach a disagreeing audience
• ethnography - helping researchers understand people in context
• education - bringing out the context of learning

Software tools could embody understandings and social cues about story context annotation for translation and sensemaking. But my feeling is that people are so overwhelmed with helpful tools that they can't keep up with the scaffolding they have already. My rating of what would be useful in this area is techniques first, habits second, and software tools a distant third. Group exercises that more explicitly address drawing out context for translation might be a helpful addition to the body of techniques for narrative sensemaking. For example, perhaps two groups with different backgrounds could come together and pick apart each others' stories, asking questions like, "Why do you say he is an outcast?" and so on. This could be revealing for both groups and for the combined community.

In practice

Without full realization of this idea, whether in tools or techniques, how could you use it today in your work with stories?

First, just try out the idea of context annotation, by yourself or in a group. Take a story you know well -- a favorite folk tale, something from your childhood, the story of your wedding -- and pretend you are telling it in the year 1200, or on the planet OOpahN, or in an ant colony. Explain everything, the way you did when "explicating" poems in English class. If you can get some naive outsider to help, that's even better. Why do people throw rice at weddings? (Or why don't they anymore?) Why do little pigs go out into the world and build houses? Why do wolves blow houses down? And so on. It's a great way to understand more of what is riding along unstated in a familiar story. Sometimes you can come up with some amazing insights that open your eyes to what is in plain sight.

I've been doing this a lot lately because my son loves to have long conversations with every character we read about. Lately Gulliver (he of the Travels) has been asking a lot of questions about the crazy things we do every day, like put our dishes into a box and talk into a stick and poke our fingers into boxes of little marked buttons. (He knows a lot more than we do about leeches, though.) Kids are in fact great helpers when it comes to bringing unspoken context out into the open. Tell a kid your story and ask them if they have any questions; you may be surprised by what you didn't tell them.

For eliciting stories, think about possible areas of context: character, plot, setting, conflict, subtlety, subtext, for example. Look at any book on narrative form to find areas you can think about. Then during interviews or when planning story collection forms, ask follow-up questions that fill in any annotation gaps you see. Pretend to be ignorant about the subject you are asking about, even if you are not. Think what people will need to understand it. If you do this well, you will not annoy your storytellers, because they will gain their own insights during the process. Make the storytelling a sensemaking session for them, and you'll get better stories as well.

For facilitating narrative sensemaking, think about the needs of the group in question and what areas of narrative context might be useful to bring out. For example, if the subject matter is full of taboo topics, help people bring out story subtexts. If people need to think about players in a situation, ask them to annotate elements of character. Plot elements can be useful if you want to help people think about knowledge use or decision making. One way to do this is to ask people to write out a story on pieces of paper, one word at a time (leaving out "a" and so on), and then think of what they would need to add to each word to make the story fully intelligible to someone from a century ago, or from another profession, or from another country, or anything that will draw out detail. Going through this process will not only help people surface issues they have not noticed; it will also bring out taboo topics with an excuse that allows them to be more freely talked about.

So in coming back to this idea, I'm not sure a fully universal story translator has any real utility, because the boundaries around human groups do have beneficial uses. But there are times when bridging boundaries has great utility in context, and for that this idea can come into useful play.

Characters in search of sensemaking, and vice versa

This post is about narrative sensemaking and play at the level of society. It will take a circuitous course, so come and stroll with me.

The grand charade

To start with, I've been watching how people are contributing to Haiti lately, for some reason. I've been amazed by the "Hope for Haiti Now" telethon (and similar previous ones). If you didn't know, the actor George Clooney gathered more than a hundred celebrities to answer telephones or perform. The effort has so far generated $57 million. What amazes me about this event is what people are saying about it. Listen to this glowing account of the "restraint" shown by the event's participants, from the New York Times TV Watch column:

More than 100 of the most famous actors and music stars in the world went on stage pretending to be nobody.... Friday night’s event, shown on dozens of networks and streamed across hundreds of Web sites, was a case study in giving it all while holding back.

This made me laugh out loud:

[The] stars wore varying shades of brown and black and studiously avoided the “I” word. Beyoncé, Madonna and Sting, sang without being identified; stars like Mr. Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio (who have each already donated $1 million) were not introduced.

The reason they "sang without being identified" and "were not introduced" is because they knew they don't have to be identified! To pretend that they modestly refused to be identified is beyond funny (and way into sad, really). Here's George W. Bush on Leonardo DiCaprio's $1 million donation, quoted in a glowing tribute at rightcelebrity.com:

"I salute Leonardo DiCaprio for his extraordinary generosity," President George W. Bush said. "This donation sends a clear message to the people of Haiti that America’s commitment to helping rebuild their country is strong. I thank Leo for setting a wonderful example for all Americans of helping a neighbor in need."

The part of this that astounds me is that people can say such superlatives as "giving it all" and "extraordinary generosity" when the opposite is so glaringly obvious. Though George Clooney gave $1 million himself, his net worth is supposedly over $80 million, and he made $25 million just in the last year. The fact is, Mr. Clooney could have donated $57 million by himself -- without having to give up a lifestyle of luxury. The same can be said for most of the people who "pretended to be nobody" during the telethon. I can't find a definite figure for Leonardo DiCaprio, but it sounds like it's over $100 million.

Is giving a million out of a hundred million "extraordinarily generous?" I'd say giving a million out of two million is extraordinarily generous. I'd say giving five thousand when you made twenty five thousand and have to turn down your heater to do it is extraordinarily generous.

My point is not to bash these people (well maybe just a bit). My point is that the disparity between reality and fiction -- what these people could really do, and what people say about what they actually choose to do -- is breathtaking. I'm tempted to call it doublethink. Attracted by this curious pattern, I've been poking around the web looking at comments on sites with glowing reviews such as the one I quoted here. Some few people do raise the point, but usually they are shouted down by the majority of people saying essentially, awwww, aren't they cute. And people are talking about George Clooney like he is Mother Teresa. I find this baffling. What could cause such a disconnect?

Villagers and dowagers

So I've been going on a little reading journey (very little) through sociology, psychology and evolutionary psychology on the subject of the celebrity phenomenon and celebrity "worship." There seem to be three main threads on this, and one of them connects to stories.

I'll get two of the threads out of the way quickly. One is that we pay a lot of attention to faces, because in almost all of human history seeing a face meant that its owner lived nearby and was important to your life. Today, a we see on a frequent basis the faces of people who don't live nearby and have nothing to do with us. That triggers an instinctual interest, as though they were actually our neighbors. Says this useful article by Erica Harrison in Cosmos magazine:

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, there was a much stronger evolutionary advantage to knowing who was an 'enemy' and who was a 'friend'.... [G]ossip in those days was a matter of life and death - it was a means of reinforcing social bonds while keeping track of who could be trusted. Anyone with a familiar face had to live nearby - so they were the ones worth keeping tabs on.
As cave painting has given way to more pervasive media, including print, television, film and the Internet, faces have been delivered, transmitted and downloaded to our living rooms from all around the globe. Familiarity is no longer a sure sign of proximity, but our neural hard-wiring has been slow to catch up. So, on some innate level we might feel as if the Neighbours we watch on television, are actually our own.

The second reason has to do with power. People are attracted to celebrities because they have money, and in today's world money means power. This is evidently such a deep instinct that the same pattern can be found in other primates. This article in the on-line newspaper The Register says:

A team from Duke University Medical Centre, led by neurobiologist Dr Michael Platt, offered 12 thirsty adult male rhesus macaque monkeys a choice between their favourite drink (Juicy Juice cherry juice, ABC News notes), and the chance to view pictures of their pack's dominant, "celebrity" monkey. Surprisingly, the monkeys eschewed the juice in favour of a bit of celeb-watching, but had to bribed with extra refreshment to look at ordinary "rhesus riffraff".

So, another instinctual trigger: being close to power. So paying attention to celebrities is no different from worming your way into the entourage of the town's wealthiest widow, a favorite pastime of snobs from time immemorial.

Societal sensemaking

Now, on to the instinct that interests me the most, because it has to do with storytelling. In reading about celebrity through the ages, two quotes stuck out. The first was in this review of the classicist Tom Payne's book Fame: From the Bronze Age to Britney:

The ancient Romans made celebrities out of their gladiators, cheering when they killed and weeping when they died. Later, they made celebrities out of the Christian martyrs who were gored by them. The ancient Greeks gossiped about their gods' love affairs – and far from being wholly mythical, the gods appeared among them all the time. As Payne says: "You could invite gods to dinner. The god Serapis [or rather, somebody posing as him] would hold parties at which he was once 'host and guest'.... You could even have sex with a goddess." The tyrant Pisistratus typically found a gorgeous woman, put her in a chariot, and announced she was the goddess Athene. The crowd howled and whooped like anyone at Wembley.

The second was in this article by David Giles and John Maltby in The Psychologist:

This bizarre state of affairs – a small group of human beings idolised by a much larger number – has existed in most societies to some extent through history. Very often those idols are never seen by their admirers because they only exist as legendary figures in oral narratives, so it doesn’t matter whether they’re real or not. Or they may be known, like monarchs or great military figures, largely through their representation on money or portrait paintings. For most people, the idols are just part of the cultural fabric, some of them superhumans to emulate, perhaps with moral significance.

It doesn't matter whether they're real or not. Celebrities have inherited from heroes and gods the mantle of societal sensemaking through narrative play. People use these characters as elements in collective narrative play, to negotiate issues such as what is required, what is "hot or not," and what is taboo.

This explains the disconnect between what people say about celebrities and what they do. These unfortunate people are being used by society to play out scenarios, and what they actually do, when it is inconsistent with what they are needed to represent, is passed over. In this article, Guillermo Jiminez mentions how dopamine is released when we watch celebrities, and how that creates a quandary:

Michael Jackson's fans have to some extent been tricked by evolution. Watching the Gloved One's uncanny gyrations and masterful crooning released entire oceans of their cerebral dopamine, but that did not change the fact that their hero was a very weird man. Indeed, Michael Jackson's life represents the very opposite of wisdom, the opposite of what one should admire or seek to emulate in a role-model.

When there is too great a disconnect between role and behavior, people choose another needed slot with a better fit. My guess is that Michael Jackson may have started out as a garden-variety hero but that he transitioned into a trickster figure at some point, so that his bizarre behavior could be accommodated.

The flip side is that people talk as much about celebrity "trashing" as worship. That explains all the "they have cellulite too" pictures in the supermarket tabloids. When a celebrity falls (sometimes through a series of accidents) into a needed negative role, every good thing they do is similarly ignored. Choosing a web site at random, popscribe.com, where "gossip is an artform!" mixes positive elements ("Celebrity Award Shows") with the newsworthy ("Celebrity Update") and the downright nasty ("Celebrity Scandals," "Celebrity Stupidity").

For the most part, celebrities have little control over how they are portrayed and used by the public. They take on a role and assume a positional identity according to what society needs, though it is probably more appropriate to say that the roles choose them. They try to exert what control they can, but it sounds like it is a constant and often losing battle.

The difficulty today is not that people use characters in societal sensemaking. That is part of the normal societal immune system. It keeps us healthy. The difficulty today is that the required characters used to be wholly fabricated (as with gods), conveniently dead (as with folk heroes) or conveniently far away and unavailable (as with folk figures like Napoleon). These characters could be easily manipulated to meet the demands of societal sensemaking. Real celebrities cannot be so easily managed. It reminds me of the old saw, here in John Ploughman's pictures (an 1896 collection of proverbs and stories):

A bachelor's wife is always well managed, and old maids always bring up their children in prime style.

The whole thing also reminds me of the excellent play Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello. In this play, six "living characters" arrive at a play's rehearsal searching for an author to finish their story. The theatre manager and actors cannot understand that the characters are not actors:

The Father. You will understand, sir, born as we are for the stage . . .
The Manager. Are you amateur actors then?
The Father. No. I say born for the stage, because . . .
The Manager. Oh, nonsense. You're an old hand, you know.
The Father. No sir, no. We act that rôle for which we have been cast, that rôle which we are given in life. And in my own case, passion itself, as usually happens, becomes a trifle theatrical when it is exalted.
The Manager. Well, well, that will do. But you see, without an author . . . I could give you the address of an author if you like . . .
The Father. No, no. Look here! You must be the author.
The Manager. I? What are you talking about?
The Father. Yes, you, you! Why not?
The Manager. Because I have never been an author: that's why.
The Father. Then why not turn author now? Everybody does it. You don't want any special qualities. Your task is made much easier by the fact that we are all here alive before you . . .

In other words, we are all the authors, collectively, of the stories we play with. Later in the play there is a nod to why people need these characters in our great sensemaking plays, and how they need to be both manipulable and long-lasting:

The Manager [determining to make fun of him]. Ah. excellent! Then you'll be saying next that you, with this comedy of yours that you brought here to act, are truer and more real than I am.
The Father [with the greatest seriousness]. But of course; without doubt!
The Manager. Ah, really?
The Father. Why, I thought you'd understand that from the beginning.
The Manager. More real than I?
The Father. If your reality can change from one day to another . . .
The Manager. But everyone knows it can change. It is always changing, the same as anyone else's.
The Father [with a cry]. No, sir, not ours! Look here! That is the very difference! Our reality doesn't change: it can't change! It can't be other than what it is, because it is already fixed for ever. It's terrible. Ours is an immutable reality which should make you shudder when you approach us if you are really conscious of the fact that your reality is a mere transitory and fleeting illusion, taking this form today and that tomorrow, according to the conditions, according to your will, your sentiments, which in turn are controlled by an intellect that shows them to you today in one manner and tomorrow . . . who knows how? . . . Illusions of reality represented in this fatuous comedy of life that never ends, nor can ever end! Because if tomorrow it were to end . . . then why, all would be finished.

People engage in societal sensemaking in order to connect to the larger story, the grand story of human existence. If they didn't, "all would be finished." Connecting people to a larger story used to be the role of religion, and it still is for many people. In fact, it's unlikely celebrity "worship" would have developed before religion lost its firm grip on society. There has even been research done, most notably by the psychologist John Maltby, that shows the more religious a person the less likely they are to "worship" celebrities. But telling everyone to become more religious tends not to have any affect, and besides, religion -- organized religion, at least -- was never the whole story.

Growing new celebrities

The prevailing wisdom in the articles I've seen about this has been that a little celebrity worship/trashing is harmless, as long as we keep it under control and don't all turn into stalkers. But that answer makes me uncomfortable. I don't think it is harmless entertainment.

What I see is that, as is spectacularly displayed in this Haiti telethon issue, when we push real people into the roles of characters in our great plays, we run the risk of changing the plays themselves. Recasting rich people giving trivial amounts of money (to them) as "extraordinarily" generous has to have an effect on the characters they are playing, eventually. The strain has to have some effect, on something, somewhere, and I fear the effect may be on our own behavior. If celebrities can give a trivial amount and still be extraordinarily generous, we can keep buying useless things while giving trivial amounts to people in desparate need. Doublethink can't be far away.

I can't help but wonder if there might be some way to bring back the more fictional, or at least more easily shaped, characters we used to have, and remove the stress (on all sides) of trying to fit real people into the narrative. We need a a way to redirect societal sensemaking into more fitting characters.

I don't have any giant answers for humanity, but I do have an interesting personal perspective on this. I stopped watching television on September 11, 2001. At the time we lived near New York City, and our house was one of the many that got most of its TV signals from the top of the twin towers. After what happened we went from four or five good channels to one or two shaky ones. We had the option of paying for cable or going without. I'd love to say I was enlightened and noble and chose the better way, but the fact is that I whined and complained, and my nasty miserly husband dragged me kicking and screaming out of the television world (that wonderful man).

But after I gave up TV a few amazing things happened. First, I noticed that when I went out to stores to shop, I started buying exactly what I wanted and then leaving. The urge to buy more stuff for no reason at all disappeared, and shopping started to seem more like the chore it is and less like wish fulfillment.

Secondly, I stopped caring about celebrities. I stopped being interested in seeing the movies they were in; instead I read reviews and found out if the story was any good. I stopped finding out what celebrities were doing and what they thought. Even Sting, who had previously been my hero, now seemed just like a nice guy who was going bald. Nine years on, when I poke around on the web I have no idea who most of the beautiful people are, and what's more, I don't care. It's enormously freeing, both in time and in the ability to have my own thoughts. It's like that episode in Star Trek where the empath is overpowered by the colliding thoughts of all the people on the ship, and then he goes to live with the giant living space thing, and he is enthralled by the peace of communing with only one mind. It feels better. Once in a while I go on hulu.com to find out if I'm missing anything, and guess what, I'm not.

The third amazing thing that has happened is that I've grown new celebrities, even without trying. I'm not going to tell you who they are, but suffice it to say that they are very cool and powerful, as well as entirely mutable to suit my purposes. They are all either dead, fictional, mythical or non-human, and so perfectly fitting. I share some of them with like-minded people (both living and long dead), and some with family members and friends; but others are mine alone.

So, if you are tired of the contradictions of the world of mainstream celebrities, or you just want to try a new way of letting your instincts flow towards narrative play, my advice is to try your hand at choosing (and designing) your own characters. Some might claim this is not a societal, or even social, response, and that I advocate hiding from society. But again that's an illusion of mass media. There has never been only one society, one theatre. Making sense of the world together is much too important of an activity to leave it at that.

[EDIT: The next morning I realized that I made a point about not watching television by referring to a television show. This might strike some as odd, but it isn't. When I was a kid, we got channels 2 (okay), 4 (usually snowy) and 6 (nearly always visible), and every once in a while a vague channel 11 would suddenly become visible for a few hours. The little black-and-white TV we had was broken half the time, and nobody bothered to fix it. That's the way I saw most of the Star Trek franchise, because even after leaving home I rarely could afford the firehose of cable. I don't think people realize how much TV has changed. If it was a Mus musculus before, it is a Tyrannosaurus rex now. It doesn't make sense to use the same word to describe it. The commercials have changed from "We make this product and we think you'll like it" to "If you buy this, beautiful people will magically prefer you, and your life will be full of meaning." Even the way people arrange chairs in the social spaces of their houses has changed. Instead of the chairs facing each other for conversation, now they all face the altar, oops, I mean entertainment center, that enshrines the TV. So yes, I referred to a tv show, but not to a TV show.]

Eight observations - 8th

The eighth observation of eight is about how computers and narrative connect. At the time I made the original eight observations I was working at IBM, so "how computing can help" was an important issue. Designing and writing software related to narrative is something I've done a lot of in the past several years, so I find I have a lot to say about these issues. (That is code for "this is going to be a long post, so stay with me.")

Grails and graffitis

My original observation was that there are two categories of goals related to computers and narrative: grails and graffitis. By "grail" I meant the holy kind, as in things we'd like to do someday but probably won't be able to do (at least not well) any time soon. The grails I named then were automatic story creation and automatic story understanding. At the time there were a few dozen people working on artificial intelligence systems to create and understand stories, and there still are. Erik Mueller at IBM Research has an excellent list of nearly 75 attempts to either create or dissect stories using computer algorithms. I haven't kept up with that part of the field, but as far as I know, for the most part these attempts are still in the theoretical realm and are not used (much?) in everyday life.

By naming the other class of computer-narrative connections "graffitis" I was referring to a story about the Graffiti handwriting recognition system for the Palm pilot, which was en vogue when I gave the talk. At that time Graffiti was a code word for a new idea in computing. The story was that after many partially successful attempts to recognize the insane variety of handwriting real people actually use, the creator of Graffiti had a brainstorm: ask people to learn a simplified shorthand-like system. This improved the accuracy of handwriting recognition tremendously. I myself used a Palm pilot at that time for taking notes during talks, and I found the Graffiti "gestures" easy to learn and even quite elegant. I could write nearly as fast with Graffiti as I could type (which is saying a lot).

I'm not sure what happened to Graffiti, but I found the idea inspiring. If you try to create a tool that meets people exactly where they are, you can get close, but making those last few steps to your goal may consume vast amounts of energy. However, if you can get people to just take a few steps to meet you, the tool can do much more to help them than it could otherwise. Call it satisficing for computers, or, computers help those who help themselves. Pretty much the same idea is what catapulted Google to fame.

So, my "graffiti" categories in that talk were two: tools that help people work with stories, and storytelling environments.

Updating the categories, or pitiful attempts at

I started working on this post by describing all of the computer-narrative interface projects I've worked on in the past ten years (it comes to around fifteen, depending on what constitutes a project). I had intended to summarize what I learned in each of the projects about what works for computers and narrative. However, the task turned out to be much more difficult than I expected, for two reasons.

First, all but one of the projects were done as a consultant. Consulting is a neither-here-nor-there kind of life: I can't speak for a client about its products, but neither have I the right to talk much about them on my own. Also, I haven't always given clients finished products: often I have contributed only designs or proof-of-concept prototypes. And even when I have completed software, clients have sometimes taken it and done who-knows-what with it afterward. So the list, as I tried to write it, was pockmarked in places where I couldn't quite say what I wanted to say about things I was not sure I could talk about.

The other difficulty in describing these projects was that the ideas I loved but could never interest clients in fully funding started to clamor for mention. In those parts of the post, unlike the pockmarked bits, the writing got too excited and went on too long. The whole thing was getting to be a mess, so I finally gave up the attempt.

However, the happy conclusion is that going through the exercise of describing these projects to myself did help me come to conclusions that I can talk about, hopefully in a way that is useful to you. (To make the clamoring ideas happy I plan to start another series of blog posts called "The Island of Misfit Story Ideas" and talk about them one by one.)

So in summary, as I look back on this observation nine years later, the grails are pretty much unchanged. That fact may reflect more of my not working in those areas than anything else, though I will have more to say about one of the grails later. The graffiti categories are also unchanged, but they have expanded into two sub-categories each. I'll go through those four categories one at a time and talk about generalities across software I've worked on. For each I say what I think is "best," meaning what I've seen work best.

Storytelling environments as narrative play arenas

By "narrative play arenas" I mean software environments in which people are supported as they grapple with issues by experiencing and manipulating stories and narrative elements. This can include looking at patterns in collected stories, comparing viewpoints, asking what-if questions by building models and other constructs, and building new stories.

This is serious play, because play is one of the most serious methods people have for making big decisions. It's a shame the word has such a dominant connotation of being for entertainment only, because it has the same serious importance for children too. That may be shifting: at this site consultants affiliated with the LEGO company actually offer workshops in serious play (yes, with Lego) for corporate groups. If the serious-play concept has gotten this far, perhaps I don't need to even say anything more about its validity.

Expansion

Like the best toys, the best software for serious narrative play is expansive and generative. When people use it, new ideas should come flooding out. The ideas will not all be good ideas, but that stage comes later. And like the best toys, such software should be fluid, flexible and open-ended. An ineffective tool for narrative play is like one of those children's toys on which the child can do nothing but push buttons and listen (I admit buying a few of these when my son was an infant, when the insecurities were running high and I fell for the "genius" gambits). I've seen software that purports to support decision making that resembles such button-pushing toys. People go through the rigid processes as prescribed, but at the end their minds haven't grown a bit, and the ideas they have coming out are not much different than the ones they had going in.

The point of narrative play is not to come to a solution, but to change your brain. Coming into the use of good narrative play software should be like coming into a room with miles and miles of paper and millions of crayons of all colors, and thousands of sticks and blocks and balls and wheels and construction sets, all of them ready to combine and recombine, and plenty of room to build towers, destroy them, and build them all over again. As a perfectionist by nature, one of my mantras when drawing is, "There's always more paper." There should always be more paper in the world of narrative play.

Discomfort

Another essential quality of software for narrative play is discomfort. Again this is like the play of children, which to be effective has to include some non-parent-alleviated disappointment and cognitive dissonance. Good narrative play software should disrupt as much as it engages. Surprising and even upsetting juxtapositions should arise. Assumptions should be challenged. Mirrors, sometimes even distorting ones, should be encountered. This can be hard to pull off in software, because software has a hard time begging people to come back. The best way to enable disruption is to let the data do the talking and keep the software clear of any sermonizing. Instead of saying "You're looking at this all wrong" it is far better to simply throw up two graphs side-by-side (what they said, what you said) and step aside.

Synergy

Finally, good narrative play includes synergistic collaborations. This is probably the hardest part of the experience to get right. An expert practitioner can help a roomful of people achieve breathtaking improvements in collective sensemaking. Capturing that magic in software is a much harder task, and I'm not sure if anyone has really done it yet. My experience has been that it's better to give people flexible tools that support synergism, but to recognize the limits of software to affect behavior and step aside and let people work our their own approaches to collaboration.

Of the narrative play environments I have worked on, the one that got closest to completion supported groups of government analysts whose task was to scan periodically collected stories and other data for upcoming problems in many spheres of national interest: security, transportation, disease, crime, and so on. The part of the system I worked on involved narrative play in that analysts would use collected "open source" items such as news stories to build constructed artifacts that represented current understandings or hypotheses, and look both for surprising differences in perspective and for outlying items that needed closer attention. This is play at its most serious.

Storytelling environments as narrative substrates

Narrative substrates are places where people share raw, spontaneous stories of personal experience as they happen or come to mind. For most of human history the only available narrative substrate has been face to face communication. In most of the world that is still true. Even when we routinely take "let's find out" to mean "let's type it into a search engine," sharing stories still happens more in person and over the phone than it does through software. However, people do tell stories using software, either unadorned in email or in discussion groups, or with "digital storytelling" software or through story sharing web sites.

The best metaphor for a software-based narrative substrate is a fertile soil, because supporting the optimum natural growth and reproduction of stories is similar to supporting the optimum natural growth and reproduction of plant life.

Diversity

One requirement for a fertile narrative soil is a diversity of experience. Ranking, popularity, and performance destroy diversity through filtering stories so that only the best get told. These measures of social comparison are useful when people are making selections among products, services, groups, and sources of information. They are inimical to story sharing.

To illustrate this, please follow me as I construct an extended metaphor. It will be worth it, I promise! This metaphor follows the same line as the "stories are seeds" analogy in Working with Stories. Quoting from here:

In the soil, tiny charged particles called micelles usually have many areas of negative charge (called sites) on their surfaces. Positively charged ions (cations) are drawn to these negative charge sites and stick to the clay particles (are adsorbed).

Any community has many sites of attention through the minds of the people in it. Stories are drawn to these sites and are remembered.

In most soils, 99% of soil cations can be found attached to micelles (clay particles and organic matter) and 1% can be found in solution. Mineral cations in the soil (mainly Ca2+, Mg2+, K+ and Na+) maintain an equilibrium between adsorption to the negative sites and solution in the soil water. This equilibrium produces exchanges -- when one cation detaches from a site (leaving it free), another cation attaches to it. Therefore the negatively charged sites are called cation exchange sites.

The great bulk of stories are remembered, while only a small percentage are actively being told at any time. Communities maintain an equilibrium between remembering and telling stories. This equilibrium produces exchanges -- when one story is told, another can be remembered.

Because any cations loose in the soil solution are vulnerable to leaching as water flows out of the soil, a high cation exchange capacity is always desirable. Cation exchange sites act as a mineral buffer for the soil, storing minerals important to plant and animal growth for long periods of time.

Because stories in circulation are vulnerable to being forgotten, a high narrative exchange capacity is always desirable. Such a capacity acts as a narrative buffer for the society, keeping stories important to human life for long periods of time.

When ammonium nitrate fertilizers are added to the soil, the ammonium ions (NH4+) are strongly attracted to cation exchange sites because of their high valence (4). The ammonium ions displace many other cations which are then leached out of the soil and lost to plants.

Purposeful stories are strongly attracted to attention sites in the community because of their strong emotional impact, compelling structure and memorability. The purposeful stories displace many other stories which are then leached out of the community and lost to the people in it.

So, if you have been reading my rants against purposeful stories taking over our lives and have wondered why it matters, this is why it matters: purposeful stories reduce the diversity of naturally occurring stories. That in turn reduces the diversity of experience available to people trying to make sense of the world, make decisions, and get along with each other.

Negotiation

Plant roots were once seen as passive receivers of water and nutrients, but this is no longer the case, says Jorge Vivanco (among many others):

The rhizosphere is a dense and complex environment, in which plant roots negotiate a shifting sea of stimuli, including pathogenic and non-pathogenic microbes, competing plant roots, various invertebrates, and a wide variety of soil conditions.

Similarly, a community is a dense and complex environment in which stories negotiate a shifting sea of stimuli, including dangerous and non-dangerous rumors, competing stories, various attempts at control, and a wide variety of community conditions.

An important determinant of root health is soil texture, or the mix of particles of different sizes in the soil. A diversity of soil particle sizes is optimal, with "loam" describing a roughly equal mix of sand, silt and clay. What loam provides to plant roots is essentially a set of tools for deriving adequate water, air and nutrients from the soil. When only one particle size is available, something critical is missing: in sandy soils, water and nutrients are lost; in clay soils, air is lost.

Software that creates loam narrative soil has a diversity of tools people can use to tell stories, look at stories, watch over stories, remember stories, make sense of stories, and deal with problems in the story substrate. When the diversity of tools is limited, functions are lost. When stories are ephemeral, memory is limited; when stories are static, the air of reorganization and reuse is missing.

Context

In gardening, microclimate is everything. The soil facing South next to your white garage may be in a different plant hardiness zone than the soil shaded by a large allopathic walnut tree in the East corner of your garden. One of the first things a new gardener learns is the folly of treating all locations equally. Farmers and gardeners engineer microclimates by adding windbreaks, flood channels, and cold frames.

In a narrative substrate, context is everything. A group telling stories about divorce in Kentucky may be in a different story hardiness zone than a group telling stories about a street in Calcutta. One of the first things a narrative substrate needs is the capacity to adapt to many contexts of storytelling. Creators of narrative substrates may want to engineer storytelling contexts by adding boundaries, privacy, signs of respect, and other context-determining measures. Thus any software that supports narrative substrates should maximize, without confusion, the ability of groups to make storytelling work within the unique contextual meaning of their group.

Narrative feature detection

When you want to find something out, it is almost too easy to collect or discover many hundreds or thousands of stories. Dealing with what has been collected, on the other hand, can be overwhelming. One antidote to narrative overload is narrative feature detection.

Feature detection in images, or computer vision, has been a goal of much research in the field of artificial intelligence, with mixed results. Some aspects of human vision have been unexpectedly difficult to duplicate. For example, looking into a moving, changing crowd and picking out a familiar face is something infants can do but computer algorithms are only starting to approach. However, other tasks have been easier for computers than for humans and thus useful to us. Detecting objects in fog or other low-contrast situations is an example that has practical applications.

Taking this as an analogy, tools that help people detect features of meaning and emotion or narrative elements in written texts (or transcripts of spoken texts) can help people see through the fog of narrative information to find looming obstacles (or opportunities). In general quite a few language and narrative tools can be helpful in this way. For example, say some thousands of stories are collected from web discussions or customer calls. Highlighting places where people made statements about values they held, or where people told stories, or where people talked about a person in a way that signaled the person was the antagonist in a story, would highlight features relevant to the needs of the moment.

Edge detection

In image processing, edge detection means simply highlighting contrasts, which are usually input into another process that tries to figure out why certain areas have higher contrast than others. In narrative work, edge detection has to do with finding contrasts in stories and story metadata: between positive and negative values, for example.

For this work the most useful tool is juxtaposition. In image processing an edge detector is essentially a small box (or "filter") that roams across the image, marking all pixels whose neighborhood shows high contrast. This produces the glowing-edge pictures you see in Photoshop.

 In narrative processing, tools can help people look across an "image" of story "pixels" for similar contrasts. The difference, of course, is that a narrative image reconvenes with every new look at it. Good narrative feature detection software makes it easy to create a range of narrative image assemblies and highlight the edges on them for consideration.

Blob detection

In image processing, blob detection is the isolation of areas that are minimally similar to other areas, such as high plateaus or valleys. The same can be done in narrative feature detection. As with edge detection, the landscape can be rearranged based on what elements matter.

I've written about the idea and practice of narrative landscapes for feature detection in this paper (see the section called "Mapping space"). It's a promising area that I think more people might want to make use of. Essentially, the idea is that if you ask questions about stories with gradients in two dimensions you care about, and then ask a question related to stability, you can create a complexity landscape of hills and valleys. Ridges and mountains indicate where people are telling stories of change or instability, and valleys or holes indicate where people are telling stories of inertia, hopelessness, or security. Looking at a landscape so produced can provide useful insights into what people believe, fear, and care about with respect to a topic you are exploring.

Of course, this form of mapping is only one of many such. The general idea is that you can use collected stories to ask questions about a variety of conditions you care about.

Pattern recognition

Pattern recognition in machine vision is about looking for known patterns on which action can be taken. Computers might be looking for particular parts to align for assembly, or faces to match with a database, or weather patterns that indicate a gathering storm. In some ways this is the most exciting part of computer vision, because people are finding out ways to enhance human pattern matching.

One of the more interesting ways pattern matching is being applied is in detecting patterns of behavior (of people, vehicles, computer programs) that indicate a situation requiring attention. People are designing systems that analyze patterns of head movement to wake up sleepy drivers, diagnose illnesses with recognizably unusual movement patterns, point out hospital patients who require immediate attention, and of course find people behaving suspiciously in airports.

Narrative pattern recognition has to do with looking for patterns about what people are saying in the stories and in answers to questions about stories. For example, in one project I can remember, stories marked as rumors featured strong links to dangerous outcomes in the use of a product, while first-hand stories showed no such links. This denoted a false rumor that could be countered by increasing the exposure of customers to true stories of the safe use of the product. In another project we found a striking set of differences in opinions about corporate responsibility and customer service that depended entirely on whether the respondent owned a home or rented one. This was an important societal distinction that determined how people felt they related to many agents in social life, including companies whose products and services they used.

I've seen hundreds of similar patterns, many of which repeat across projects, and I've built up a sort of library of expected and unexpected narrative patterns. Another common one often comes up in relation to age and participation in organizational life. People start out their careers with great energy and idealism, but little power. In the middle years their energy wanes while their power to affect change grows too slowly, causing frustration and burnout. Older people tend to bifurcate into two groups: those in power, thus satisfied (and sometimes blind to idealism), and those out of power, jaded, and unable to muster the energy to keep trying. Whenever storytellers answer an age question, I know to look for that pattern, and for any manifestations of distortions to it.

Detecting abnormal human behavior similarly relies on detecting an array of subtle cues in facial expression, body language, and word choice that indicate known patterns. This article describes what is being done in airports to detect the ways people behave when they have something to conceal. In The Wizards Project, Paul Ekman and Maureen O'Sullivan examined some twenty thousand people and found only fifty who could detect a lie with at least 80% accuracy. Ekman and O'Sullivan also found that while some people have a natural talent for reading the complex nuances of human microexpression and body language, others can learn to do this through training.

I've never taken any sort of evaluation on whether I have a special ability to pick up on deception, but I did once have a boss who insisted on taking me to every meeting because she said I could tell her when people were hiding something. The idea of "wizards" scares me because it seems to set up a superclass who might exert power based on invisible skills -- always a setup for corruption. But it does make me wonder if that old story is linked to the ease with which I pick up on patterns in bodies of collected stories (though it could just as easily be simple practice). I remember one conversation where I was telling others in my group how I used grounded theory on a collection of stories, and I said, "Next I circled all the phrases that jumped out," and one person stopped me and said, "Wait, don't you realize, nothing jumps out to us." I found this hard to believe, but it sounds weirdly reminiscent of what I've read about "naturals" in human lie detection. I've also read that facility in grounded theory, which similarly relies on picking up subtle cues of meaning in spoken or written text, requires a degree of natural talent that can be approximated by training.

I didn't bring up my possible natural talent in narrative pattern recognition for self-aggrandizement, but to make a point about designing software for narrative pattern detection. Expert pattern recognizers, whether natural or trained, need a flexible set of tools that respond to their good instincts with alacrity. But for novice pattern matchers flexibility can be damaging. They don't know where to start, and they can't call up tools that respond to their instincts, because they don't have any. They look at the mass of stories and nothing jumps out at them. I'd go so far as to say that software for novice and expert pattern matchers has contradictory specifications.

One software feature that can benefit both expert and novice pattern matchers is the embodiment of expertise in stored templates. For example, a software program could support the creation of search templates which experts create and novices apply. As novices become more familiar with the process and instincts begin to emerge, they can start creating their own templates. The story-scanning system I mentioned above (for government analysts) included aspects of template creation and sharing, in the form of conceptual models and other constructed artifacts, for this purpose.

Templates also have the benefit of breaking up some of the solidification that takes place as expertise builds, by juxtaposing templates drawn from different perspectives. For example, two expert analysts, one in health care and one in transportation, might create separate search templates, then use them to examine differences in pattern recognition among collected stories from multiple perspectives. Building adversarial templates from source documents, for example speeches by terrorist leaders, can also help to shake up overly ossified assumptions about why people do what they do.

Grounded story construction

The final group of software projects I've worked on (and this may surprise some) has to do with crafting purposeful stories. I actually think what is available to people who have a need to craft purposeful stories -- to teach, to persuade, to engage -- is far poorer than what could be created (and I will visit some of these ideas on the Island of Misfit Story Ideas later). However, as with narrative pattern detection, there is so much skill and natural talent involved that it is difficult to build tools that work equally well for everyone.

The metaphor (there must be a metaphor, you know) that springs up for story construction is the suite of tools digital artists use to create works of art -- photography, visual design, and so on. As above I have chosen the three aspects of such software that I think provide the greatest benefit.

Play

My two favorite parts of Photoshop, which I use to "mess around" with photographs, are the Filter Gallery and the Color Variations screen. (In fact, this is the main reason I usually choose Photoshop over the Gimp, though I like that for some other things, like better extensibility.) Using these interfaces, I can very quickly play with alterations to my image, thus:

Juxtaposing these variations either in space or in time creates an expansiveness that enables play with the image I am creating. You may notice that this is similar to the play I talked about way up there in the section about narrative sensemaking. There's a reason for that. The best creation involves sensemaking, and the best sensemaking involves creation. They work together.

All of the exercises I know of related to making sense of stories (not least those described in Working with Stories) can result in material that works for purposeful story creation. Because the exercises are typically used for sensemaking only, the result is typically discarded; but in most of the sessions I've seen it has been clear that the end product could have been used to create polished purposeful stories. In the case of the composite story exercise, the result is literally a story, but an unpolished one.

Emergent constructs such as personifications, situations, motivations, values, and so on could be used to build stories. People in a sensemaking exercise could derive the constructs, then combine them into stories using such a simple device as writing the constructs on cards and making up some rules for combination. You might ask people to select two personification cards, one value card, one motivation card, one situation card, and so on, and build a story out of them. What you have at the end of the sensemaking session is a set of half-formed, but grounded, meaningful, resonant stories.

What happens next hinges again on the distinction between experts and novices. A person skilled at writing stories -- a short story writer, for example -- would be able to take the outcome of any narrative sensemaking exercise and "run with it" to build persuasive, compelling purposeful stories. Such stories would be far superior to any other crafted stories in achieving their goals, because they would be grounded in what matters and makes sense to people involved in the issue. Stories with excellent narrative form without relevant grounding are like movies with excellent special effects but plodding, predictable stories -- the surface shimmers, but the depth is featureless.

Scaffolding

The other way to support grounded storymaking is to create tools that help non-experts craft compelling, purposeful stories based on the outcome of narrative sensemaking exercises. Again templates come into play, this time in the form of folktales or fables. The structure of fables is ancient and well-known, and using fable form is the best way I know of for expert storytellers (through the ages) to help novices craft well-formed stories. (I once worked on prototype software that helped people apply folk-tale templates to collected anecdotes for the purpose of quickly presenting complex understandings. I won't say more about it here, because it lives on the Island of Misfit Story Ideas and will have its own post later.)

In the visual arts, templates come into play in the cultural language of visual expression. Certain attributes of created images convey messages of purpose and context quickly and effortlessly. Consider what these devices convey:

• sepia coloring - old times, history
  
• "torn" edges - a photo album, "you are there" reporting
• tilted and sometimes backwards letters - for or by kids
• psychedelic colors - alternative perspectives, nonconformity
  
• black and white - artsy, authentic
  
• extreme close-ups - edgy, penetrating
• "foggy" edges - cute, romantic

... and on and on through hundreds or even thousands of variations instantly recognized by people and used by design experts. Even sites like blogger.com give you a quick way to send messages through your choice of style templates.

The universe of folk tale forms does the same thing with stories, though those styles are less well known. I'm not sure very many experts in folk tale form remain, since people have become unused to telling them. Embodying some of that knowledge in software can help people communicate in the same way that choosing "Artistic" and "Stylized" filters in Photoshop can help you embed a cultural message in an image.

Now here's something interesting. Just now, when I looked up "software for fiction writing" I found oodles of offerings: software to help you keep track of your characters, discover plot holes, record research, break writer's block, free up creativity, brainstorm, rearrange ideas, profile your story, and so on ad infinitum. But when I tried adding "folktales" or "fables" to the search text, the links I found were different: they all related to helping schoolchildren use fables in lesson plans about simple writing. I wonder if "serious" writers don't use folktale structures because they think such structures are too simple, or only for children, or not "real" storytelling. Most of the people who buy software that helps them write stories seem to be hoping to write the next great novel, which may explain the preference. That may be true, but for smaller efforts, templates based on folktale structure represent an untapped resource.

Inspection

The third element of purposeful storytelling on which I have worked (at the prototype stage) is in the area of providing objective inspection functions.

Software for visual artists supports image inspection in two ways. First, most image software includes diagnostic aids such as histograms, edge detection and print previews. All of these draw the artist's attention to problem spots. In addition, many artists participate in mutual image reviewing in a group or community. Sites such as deviantART are essential resources for artists bent on refining their skills.

As with images, story inspection overlaps with feature detection. Applying filters that reveal edges, zones, and patterns in stories can help writers improve the coherence and effect of their stories. Generally, the analogue of image diagnosis in story writing has to do with emotion and value, since those are the colors of story palettes. I've worked on software that inspected stories and other texts for expressions of value, emotional intensity, and other aspects of meaning.

And as with images, software that helps people gather reactions to told stories can help them refine their skills and output. Most of the so-called story sharing sites on the internet are more about mutual inspection and review than they are about narrative substrate creation. On a mutual-review site, ratings, popularity, and "hot or not" comments help people hone their skills with needed feedback.

Revisiting the story understanding grail

Finally, I will return to one of the grails of my original observation: automated story understanding. I helped with one project related to this, though only tangentially. The project involved automating classification of stories, for example marking those with extreme expressions of emotion or values. The results were surprisingly good for issues like emotional intensity and positive-negative value; but still, the accuracy didn't exceed something like eighty percent.

What I saw was that the first 80% and the last 20% of automation can have contradictory results. The first 80% may be immensely helpful, but pursuing that last 20% can destroy the utility of the first part, and then some. For example, a mostly-automated indexer that suggests classifications could reduce the time needed to complete a process (say, triaging customer complaints or sonograms); but a completely-automated indexer that classifies items without human oversight could miss the one critical case out of a million that any human would know was in need of immediate attention. Missing that case could eradicate the gains created by all of the other automation.

So, this grail is still far off, in my opinion. Besides, I think it's a moving target. I would not be at all surprised if robots fifty years from now can understand all the nuances of human communication. But I would not be at all surprised if robots fifty years from now demand equal rights ... which would leave us pretty much back where we started. Said Gregory Bateson in Mind and Nature:

There was once a man who had a computer, and he asked it, "Do you compute that you will ever be able to think like a human being?" And after assorted grindings and beepings, a slip of paper came out of the computer that said, "That reminds me of a story ... "

In practice

As fascinating as this tour through computer narrative world may be, you are saying, how does it help me in my quest to work with stories? Well, that's hard to say. Of the projects I drew from here, only two are available for use: Cognitive Edge's SenseMaker Suite (though it has moved on since I was involved with it) and Rakontu. The former is useful for narrative play and feature detection. My dream is for Rakontu to encompass all of the graffitis I mention here, but that is far off; at the moment it mainly supports a narrative substrate, with a bit of narrative play and feature detection.

However, you don't necessarily need dedicated software to achieve these benefits. One of the reasons I listed features of useful software for each category is that you can gain those benefits by using software you already use in new ways, and you may not even need software in some cases. Word processors can be used for play; search engines can be used for feature detection; books of folktales can be used for story construction. You can build your own solutions for any of these goals, if you know what you need to build. Hopefully this journey through what I've learned will give you some resources to help you.

Fiction, reality and storytelling

An interesting New Yorker article this week: Daniel Mendelssohn, in "But Enough About Me," talks about the blurring between reality and fiction in memoir writing. What interested me was when he talked about personal stories.

"Reality itself is a term that is rapidly being devalued. Take reality TV: on these shows, "real" people (that is, people who aren't professional actors) are placed in artificial situations ... in order to provoke the "real" emotions that the audience tunes in to witness...."

Notice all the quotes around "real." This is not reality, and we all know that. That's what makes it funny. It's wannabe fiction, a reincarnation of the B-grade movie. Even if the people participating in reality TV are not professional actors, you can bet they want to be.

Mendelssohn goes on to say that the rise of reality TV was caused in part by talk shows that trotted out for voyeurism the couldn't-happen-to-me problems of "real" people:

"...the premium placed by these shows on the spontaneous expression of genuine and extreme emotions has justified setups that are all too obviously unreal -- in a word, fictional."

But these people are also wannabe actors, or more likely wannabe celebrities. That's clear after ten minutes of watching their antics. These stories are told with a definite purpose, as "spontaneous" as they appear to be. Actually, the fake spontenaity is just a part of the artifice.

The way I interpret the obvious thirst we have for these "reality" fictions is this. We are all parched for the naturally occuring storytelling that happens in real social connection. We are more thirsty for this experience than we have ever been, because it is less available to us than it has ever been. But we have become so convinced that only purposeful stories are real stories that we can only look for what we crave where it cannot be found.

It's like we are thirsty for water, but we've forgotten water exists because we are so used to drinking Water. So we drink more Water, and more "water-flavored" Water, and we get more and more thirsty and can't understand why. What we really need is water. We need to return to spending time with the people we know and telling each other what has been happening to us. Have you noticed that even when we do get together lately, we turn away from each other and consume packaged stories? It's almost like we are afraid of something, like we are running from life itself, like we prefer the copy to the original. I've had two experiences recently where I joined a social group hoping to share experiences, and within a few meetings somebody had invited an expert to teach us how to do things properly, meaning to tell us prepared stories. For me, it sucked all the fun out of the group. The amazing thing was that I couldn't get anyone to understand why I didn't like the groups anymore. It was all the same to them.

The most interesting part of this article, for me, is in a telling juxtaposition. First, Mendelssohn mentions how people are inundated with stories by overhearing the cell-phone conversations of those around them. Then later he criticizes those who attack published memoirists for not telling the absolute truth and says people always re-story their experiences. These statements led me to the conclusion that many of those who write about storytelling, Mendelssohn among them, must be oblivious to the distinction between packaged and naturally occurring stories, even though it underlies many of the trends they are talking about. All of the forms of narrative discussed here -- memoir, talk show, reality TV, life story, even "personal narrative" -- no matter how "reality-based," are packaged, purposeful stories, created for far-flung consumption. The one glaring exception is cell-phone conversations, which are simply added to the mix without comment. Lumping what you overhear on cell phones with what you hear on Oprah shows that we have lost the ability to distinguish between story sharing and story broadcasting.

When I lived on Long Island I used to say that the way the city had overtaken the island reminded me of the way a butter knife spreads and thins out clumps of hot butter on a slice of toast: the towns were barely recognizable amid the suburban sprawl that had filled all the spaces between. The narrative world feels that way too: every in-between space has been taken up by packaged stories, and the towns (meaning, the localized worlds of related, relevant, contextual, personally exchanged narratives) barely register anymore. And what's worse, we seem to have forgotten where the towns were. On Long Island, what used to be this town or that town has merged into one giant entity, and the younger people hardly talk about the towns anymore. I've seen this happen with narrative too, in the way people talk about what happened on some sitcom or movie as though it happened to them personally. It's all the same to them.

The loss of distinction between local and packaged-for-travel narrative reminds me of how the locavore movement has had such difficulty getting people involved. It's a tomato, isn't it? It's a story, isn't it? Hey, maybe we need a locastory movement (or some better name). Maybe we can set up story sharing clubs and boot out all the book reading clubs. Maybe we can start the equivalent of community-supported agriculture -- show up every week to get your box of locally grown stories. Maybe I should write a personal memoir about not reading any stories that didn't originate within the 100 people most important to me. Maybe it will sell millions of copies.

Social media, Haiti, and the easy way out

I'm working on the eighth in my "observations" blog posts, but it's like pulling teeth and is taking a long time (you'll find out why soon). But here is another issue that has been grating at me lately and I find I can't keep still any longer.

Okay. If I see one more news article or blog post saying "Isn't it wonderful that two million people have texted ten dollars each to help Haiti!" I'm going to throw up. Isn't it awful that two million people have texted ten dollars each to help Haiti? This "confirms the value" of social media? I'd say it does the opposite. How many of those two million people followed up that ten dollars with more? Or did it give them an easy way out, a quick button press and you're off the hook?

Look, folks, anyone fortunate enough to have a device on which they can instantly send money halfway around the world (and who is not eight years old or unemployed) can afford to give more than ten dollars. Here's an algorithm for social media giving. What did you pay for that fancy gadget you are using to send the money? If you chose any "extras" you didn't need, like getting it in pink or adding that snazzy pleather holder, make sure to consider that. Take at least ten percent of the total. Now, if the people you are sending the money to cannot imagine owning such a device, double it. Then, if the people you are sending the money to have been waiting for three days to get their broken legs looked at, why not think of doubling it again.

Come on, people! Let's stop patting ourselves on our backs for doing nothing! What a bunch of Marie Antoinettes we are. If social media worked for social good, why did Haiti get into this mess to begin with? Geologists have been lamenting to a deaf world about this earthquake for years, but nobody listened when something could still be done. What I've heard is that people are showing up with temporary relief equipment, and the Haitians are finding it better than what they had before the quake. Essentially, our inflatable hospitals are better than their real hospitals. If this event doesn't wake people up to the horrendous double standards we live under, nothing will.

So, here is some unsolicited advice to the people setting up the donation lines. I know you are trying to reach people who don't give, but set your sights a little higher. People pay ten dollars for two slices of pizza and a Coke. Ask for at least the price of a fancy pretty movie about poor different-skin-color people being exploited. (I was planning to see Avatar, but until I hear half of it is going to Pandora, oops Haiti, I'll pass. This site shows contributions by governments to Haiti as Avatar minutes. The US government's donation of $100 million comes out to six Avatar minutes per citizen, so the sum total of the texting donations is ... well, you do the math. Not so wonderful if you look at it that way. When I looked up Avatar to get the name of the planet and people right, the first result was "The people chose Avatar." Sad but true. If you went to Avatar, good for you. Now help the real Navi.)

Some advice to the people going on and on about how social media has been validated, proven, confirmed, and all that: look at the total, not just the number of contributors. Is the total higher than it would have been? I'm not sure. I wonder if it's lower than it would have been. I'd like to see those statistics before I concur that it has been a huge success.

Some advice to people responding to these give-a-little campaigns: I was poking around reading about charity and Haiti and found the tidbit that Madonna has given $250,000. Just for fun, I looked up Madonna's net worth, and it's about $900 million; so she has given roughly 0.03 percent of her wealth to help with this crisis. Based on a generous assessment of my family's net worth, I've now given about ten times as much as that, and I feel bad enough about it that I'll probably double it soon. I'm sure Madonna gives to other charities and I don't mean to single her out, but - if you don't want to go by how much your phone cost, here's another benchmark. Why not join me in outdoing the material girl? How about one percent of your net worth? Is that more than ten dollars?