Why Stories Matter
Image: Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kate Hollenbach
Like many other artists, I have a need to create something. Specifically in my case I like to tell stories, the media I use it sometimes secondary. I like to use different media for different kinds of stories but I started thinking why is there this drive? I could be doing something like curing cancer or bringing about world peace instead of making a film.
So why is it so important to for me to tell these stories? I gave it a ton of thought and came to the conclusion that as storytellers, we occupy an interesting niche especially when seen in hindsight. History tells us what we did, stories tell us who we were.
I was reminded by this in a tweet Ted Hope put out yesterday asking why we make movies and again this morning when I came across an article about the artwork you see up there from Wired. There was a great quote in it that I wanted to share from it:
The information contained in literature, or even email, encodes our identity as human beings. The entire literary canon may be smaller than what comes out of particle accelerators or models of the human brain, but the meaning coded into words can’t be measured in bytes. It’s deeply compressed. Twelve words from Voltaire can hold a lifetime of experience.
Amen. And that is why story and art matter.
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