Serving ‘bread and amusements storytelling’

By Limor Shiponi

‘Bread and amusements’ eventually enslaved the Romans to their barbarian invaders. ‘Bread and amusements storytelling’ can eventually enslave users to their brain invaders. I’m not telling you a new story here.

I’m not against technology. I’m against using technology where it causes degeneration. We don’t need to revolutionize the way we tell our stories, we need to tell them. Why have many people stopped telling stories? Because many people have stopped listening to them and started listening to ‘bigger’ stories, ‘stickier’ stories created and spread through manipulation and platforms more forceful than the skillful achievement of one person or the natural pace of word-of-mouth. Fireworks makes everybody excited and some a little afraid as long as they last a few minutes. More than that, once or twice a year, takes away the meaning from the human-size events of life. Fireworks are a metaphor in this post – skillfully prepared, strategically situated to impress.

Storytelling is highly interactive, improvisational and social. Notice the difference between story and storytelling – not the same thing and a common swap that appears in MIT’s announcement like it appears in many other places. Audiences are already active participants in the storytelling process. In fact, without the presence of an audience, our art does not exist because its outcome lives only in their imagination; bombarding it with dramatic visual events well prepared, degenerates people. Lately, God has a keyboard and the only reason for something to die is running out of batteries. Humans don’t need help bridging real and virtual worlds – we created them even before modern technology existed…

How can someone come to the conclusion people need help telling stories? In the technological world – easily, just browse through any website that invites user-generated stories and you’ll find something that looks like this:

Now, that’s called lending an ear…