Comments on: Everything is a Story

By: peter

peter — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:01:09 +0000

Sorry to disagree, but not everything is a story — some things are arguments. The difference between the two is quite simple:

Stories are time-sequenced listings of events, events which may or may not be causally-connected, eg,

“X happened, and then Y happened.”

Arguments are justifications for believing some conclusion given a belief in some premises, eg

“Because Z is true, we can conclude that W is also true.”

“Because Z is true, we can conclude that we should do W.”

There are many different justifications possible in an argument. Isaac Newton, for example, drew conclusions about the movements of planets based upon the results of experiments conducted here on earth with pendulums. (On the face of it, this justification is absurd, but modern physics has taken it for granted since Newton.)

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Story Metrics || October || 2008

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 03:41:55 +0000

[...] I want to build on my last two posts (which both have excellent comments that you should check out, even though I haven’t managed to be coherent enough this week yet to respond). In [...]

By: Beemer

Beemer — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 04:09:52 +0000

your brand is what your customers tell other people (it sounds like Hugh MacLeod or Seth Godin, but I couldn’t find a reference).

Grant McCracken?

By: Nathan McGee

Nathan McGee — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:56:41 +0000

I agree that stories help us as humans deal with our surroundings, either by creating stories as a way of explaining what is happening or utilizing metaphoric stories to prove a point or make a statement.

It is also interesting that people who have mastered the skill of story telling are more interesting and dynamic people to be around.

Hope you are having fun at google!

By: Beemer

Beemer — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:24:02 +0000

One of the dangers we face currently as a society is that we no longer have a unifying set of stories that you can expect everybody to believe.

I don’t think it’s ever been true that there was a single unifying set of stories everyone believed. What’s different now is that we’re aware that broader society is composed of many subcultures, each with its own set of stories. You can’t pretend anymore that mainstream culture is the only thing that exists, because it’s so easy to find subcultures now that you can do it accidentally.

The danger in this situation comes from people really wanting theirs to be the One True Way and not being willing to engage in life patterns that will accommodate diversity. This has always been true, and historically the solution has been various forms of oppression. But now that it’s obvious to the subcultures that they’re not alone, they fight back a lot harder. What we have to watch out for as a society is not finding ways to peacefully coexist in parallel and having the conflict between (sub-)cultures spiral out of control.