{ Monday, February 6, 2006 }
Last week I had dinner with some remarkably brilliant people, and we were talking about the importance of stories, how the human mind tends towards narrative, how causation, fort-da, one thing follows another chronology is necessary -- otherwise everything would happen all at once, haha. But the mind can't help but construct narratives out of everything. I brought up the research by Peter Nisbett wherein he found that people make up stories for 'how they know something' (look up his other stuff too, he did studies of people explaining why they thought one pair of identical panty hose was better than another pair, stuff like that). Someone once told me we sleep because we need to have a beginning and an end. We argued whether or not mathematical equations are narrative, and concluded they are not.
Why Start a Company?. On the blog from Plum, a new startup that just came out of stealth, a story about why they started the company, based on a personal story by the founder. It's a great story. Similarly, when we were trying to explain Flickr, we'd tell a story of Stewart's grandmother's 80th birthday party, where the photo albums were spread out across the table from the 20s, 30s and 40s, and how everyone would say things like "That must be the house on St. Lawrence Street just before the War" and "That was Tom's girlfriend Katie from 1974..." -- and how the conversations around the images were the metadata, but after the party was over, and everyone went home, everything was lost; no one knew where the albums were anymore -- obviously they had to be online, where everyone could get to them, and shared...thus, Flickr. A pretty good story. But even better is when people start telling us the exact same story, unbeknownst to them: one of my friends tells me she put some old family photos online, and found a long lost relative in Brazil, who started annotating the photos with her.Looking at the graphic in the previous post is a little depressing; it reminds me of a fluorescent lit grocery store with a hundred brightly colored packaged goods clamoring for your attention. I'm burnt out on hearing/reading about/keeping track of all the bright shiny objects that are all over the place. But Plum has gotten off on the right foot, with its moving and very personal story.
LINK | 3:38 PM | TB
The worse problem I find is the old family photos that are not annotated. Have never really thought about using flickr for ancient family stuff - thanks
Geoff | February 7, 2006 1:10 AMHello Caterina:
I just happened on your site while blog hopping. I'm always excited to find other aspiring novelists online. I'll be back.
[ line breaks not accurate ]
A Supermarket in California
--Allen Ginsberg
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
Thanks for this post Caterina. Storytelling touches deep, deep roots in the human experience. Your calling this out in relation to Plum has sparked some ideas for me for my company. :-)
Paul Kim | February 11, 2006 4:09 PMHmm...I'd always thought that narrative was the dominant concept. That facts are merely things that hang off narratives, like fruits on trees. In that sense, they are inescapable.
Take memory, for example. We store the past as a narrative. Memories of isolated events, disconnected from the otherwise grand narrative we create of our own life, are doomed to die a lonely death.
The grandest narrative of all, of course, is the one we have constructed regarding the world around us. We can only comprehend it on our own terms and so we give it force and meaning and will.
If I sing you stories about Jack and Jill, I may also observe that Jack always follows Jill; Where there is one, the other always follows. This is an observation about the story but also forms a story element in and of itself. It is a relationship and mathematics is nothing more than relationships. We can't escape stories because they are our only tool.
I am afraid to say your brilliant friends are superbly wrong :) Mathematics, like Science, is pure narrative. We've been lucky I think to get as far as we have by imposing a human face to the Universe, but, arguably, we can only get so far by asssuming that the larger Universe cares about being understood by a race of storytellers.
vacapinta | February 13, 2006 1:31 AM{ Post a comment }
Nice story from Plum - shows that you must have the need before you can build the product.
Migs | February 6, 2006 8:45 PM