Narrative Collapse

Metadata

• Author: [[L. M. Sacasas]]
• Full Title: Narrative Collapse
• Category: #articles
• URL: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/narrative-collapse

Highlights

• “The primary purpose of narrative,” media scholar Katherine Hayles argued several years ago, “is to search for meaning,” which makes “narrative an essential technology for human beings, who can arguably be defined as meaning-­seeking animals.”
  • Tags: [[narrative]]
• Narrative, too, is a deceptively simple technique deployed by the human mind in order to make sense of the world.
• Narrative is a tool by which we extract (or impose, depending on your perspective) meaning from the chaotic flux of being in the world—the
• Narrative is our default sense-making technique, in part, because it reflects our fundamentally time-bound existence.
• This is what MacIntyre was getting at when he said that you can know what you are to do only if you also know what story or stories you are a part of.
• What is novel is the information ecosystem in which all of this and more is unfolding. Most of us now have far greater access to information about the world, and we are—arguably, I grant—exposed to a far wider array of competing narratives attempting, without notable success, to make sense of it all.
• “The ‘message’ of any medium or technology,” McLuhan wrote, “is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts,” McLuhan added, “but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”
• One effect of our digital media environment, then, is to immerse us in searchable databases of information rather than present us with comprehensive, integrated, and broadly compelling narratives.