‘Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely,’ Gladwell favours old-school narrative techniques where performance is concerned.‘PowerPoint has destroyed storytelling, so I pledge there will be no PowerPoint. It’s going to be very 19th century, like how Mark Twain would come to England in the 1880s or Charles Dickens would go to America.’
Unphotographable. The concept is briliant. The execution proves how beautiful just looking at the world can be. And how poetic. Pictures can not say more than a thousand words, they seldom twirl out of their framed reality into fragments of true and complex connections. Well, that’s what I think.
At unphotographable it is tenderly shown how moving writing can be.
This is a picture I did not take of a man running in front of mid-morning freeway traffic, his right hand clutching a closed, plaid umbrella, his left hand gripping the handle of a hamster cage (complete with spinning-wheel and water bottle) in which the hamster’s attempting to scale one of the cage’s walls, and in doing so, throws the cage off-balance, which tilts the cage in the man’s grip, forcing him to adjust as he dodges the traffic, his plaid umbrella arm higher to compensate for the shifting hamster who’s getting close to the cage’s ceiling, and closer to the man’s left hand, gripping the handle of a hamster cage amid honking traffic on a mid-morning freeway off-ramp.
- Storytelling is a human universal, and common themes appear in tales throughout history and all over the the world.
- These characteristics of stories, and our natural affinity toward them, reveal clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy in the mind.
- By studying narrative’s power to influence beliefs, researchers are discovering how we analyze information and accept new ideas.
The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn: Scientific American
Zelf schreef hij dat poëzie overleeft door zich stil te houden, door ‘niet volledig begrijpelijk te zijn, geen sociale veranderingen te beïnvloeden, niemand tot last te zijn’. Poëzie kan afwachten. ‘Poëzie moet liggen en hoe langer zij ligt des te bijzonderder van binnen zij wordt.’
Books Published: The size of each territory shows the number of new book titles published each year*
“Each new book published is counted only once on this map, regardless of how many copies it sells… A book is defined as having at least 50 pages; a pamphlet has 5 to 49 pages. Publications with fewer than 5 pages are not shown on this map. Worldwide, about a million new book titles were published in 1999, with the largest numbers published in the United Kingdom, China and Germany. Overall, the map is dominated by Western Europe, which is home to a number of well established publishing houses.” *Books titles published, number per million people, 1999.
From – The Atlas of the Real World
There is not much Malcolm Gladwell can’t produce a compelling story about. His gift of using stories to make a point, is an inspiration to every one who wants to get a message across.
His new book is coming out (hooray).
Bas
Two days ago, The MIT Media Laboratory announced the creation of the Center for Future Storytelling. This Center will research and and experiment on Hollywood Film-storytelling, because – according to the new CFS, good stories are becoming scarce in Hollywood. Now I must say that good (read complex, intelligent and refined) stories never have been a commodity in Hollywood; but we seem to be really running downhill now.
Oh well.
I completely agree with The New Yorker’s Richards Brody – although his ‘clever’ remark on having or telling stories is a bit academic.
Read the NY Times article here.
Bas
P.S. I do hope CFS teams up with initiatives on investigating new storytelling from for instant the perspective of a game…
“The narratives of the world are without number…the narrative is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; the history of narrative begins with the history of mankind; there does not exist, and never has existed, a people without narratives:” (Barthes)
