By Limor Shiponi
Just an early morning thought… reading hype descriptions about ‘cool’ story production and distributing possibilities and wishes for a future of endless unlimited choice; to move from a movie scene into a game episode that will send the traveler to endless paths, roaming past and future worlds; meeting with new sound tracks and endless-dimensional visual impressions the traveler could immerse into with a tap of a finger or even better – a thought; gaining satisfaction from choice, choice, choice fulfilling the most probably oppressed need for freedom and breaking the ropes of obligations not needing to give your full attention to anything or anyone…
Suddenly it strikes me that all these descriptions sound to me like the ancient wish for immortality.
Storytelling is for mortal species. It includes paying full attention to others, to content, to interaction, to being. We can roam endless worlds via imagination but we are there looking at each other, validating our existence second after second. That’s part of what I like about storytelling – it’s real and it can continue only for a mortal time-span. Eventually everyone needs to go to the toilet. Eventually, we’ll all die. Better pay attention and have a real life until then. If you do, you will not walk-away unnoticed. Someone will remember you.
If you pay attention you’ll be payed back. It’s a really nice feeling. Have a nice day!
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Good insight….seems to be serious cultural resistance to anything to do with aging or mortalilty building up in the West right now. All the things you’ve highlighted are to do with an existing in an endlessly extended present. A very adolescent ambition, seems to me.
I wonder if there’s any connection with the relative youth of all the technologies involved? Even newspapers have only been around for a few hundred years, whereas we’ve been storytelling ever since we’ve had language….quarter of a million years, say?
I can’t say if that’s the reason but I do notice one thing: since the moment people started documenting content in formats that are nonexpendable or at least can keep for a very long time, they also started valuing those tools as amplifiers. First as tools that can give content a greater reach, later as a source of scalable income and now as the possibility for immortality.
Seriously, many people today are living inside content, neglecting the fact that unlike content, they do not have eternal shelf life…