The Story of Stories traces the arc of storytelling across human history

The Story of Stories
Kevin Ashton
Harper, $32

Back successful 1944, 2 psychologists performed a somewhat mundane experiment. The researchers asked group to simply watch a short movie and picture it. Most of nan viewers spun elaborate tales involving lovers, unit and abandonment. That’s beautiful amazing, considering nan movie featured only shapes: 2 triangles and a circle that moved successful and retired of a rectangle.

Our brains, arsenic it turns out, tin find a communicative successful anything.

That’s nan cardinal truth astatine nan bosom of The Story of Stories. In this wide-ranging book, technologist Kevin Ashton dips into nan often unusual history of storytelling itself, arsenic he describes nan technologies that person evolved alongside these tales and makes nan lawsuit for why stories matter. It’s a compelling effort, peculiarly coming erstwhile everyone pinch a smartphone tin beryllium a storyteller.

Ashton sets himself an audacious extremity of tracing an overarching communicative of each stories from nan earliest tales. Chapter 1 originates pinch fire, astir which our ancestors sat astatine night. Around these fires, nan imperatives of nan day’s activity fell away. “In nan warmth and information of their flames, they communicated astir events remembered and imagined, from places and times adjacent and far. Or, they started telling stories,” Ashton writes.

The chapters that travel connection scattershot history lessons, funny anecdotes of nan ways stories person been passed from personification to person, and lively descriptions of revolutionary technologies — from nan printing property to energy to Facebook.

Ashton has a knack for pulling retired memorable bits from humanities records, technological studies and different sources for readers. For instance, successful nan mid-1800s successful nan United States, earlier insubstantial was regularly made from wood pulp, insubstantial was made from cloth rags. Some of those rags were pulled disconnected Egyptian mummies and stank to precocious heaven. “Paper mills did not ever admit that their ‘Egyptian rags’ had erstwhile wrapped mummies, possibly for fearfulness of upsetting a delicate public,” he writes.

The communicative arc of The Story of Stories tin astatine times beryllium difficult to follow; readers are occasionally near without a beardown anchor statement arsenic nan book flits from anecdote to anecdote. But instrumentality pinch it and yet nan soft orangish glow of Chapter 1’s ancient fires move bluish — nan harsh ray of smartphone screens.

In nan integer age, particularly pinch nan ubiquity of societal media, “we person gone from a world wherever a fewer group could show stories to a fewer people, to a world wherever everyone tin show stories to everyone,” Ashton writes. Storytelling (and listening) has reached a fever pitch.

The implications of this description are many, and they’re surely not each positive.

Misinformation and disinformation astir COVID-19 and vaccines dispersed acold and wide during nan pandemic. Ashton specifications really integer lies contributed to immoderate group refusing to get vaccinated, much cases of terrible illness and much preventable deaths.

Manipulative stories that convincingly correspond fabrication arsenic truth — owed to generative AI’s expertise to create realistic clone images, video and audio — proceed to spread.

Playing pinch people’s perceptions will go moreover easier arsenic generative AI gets amended astatine mimicking reality. Will powerful group “rewind clip to opportunity things they did not say, and to unsay things they did?” Likely yes, Ashton says. Popular integer platforms “are not shaping nan online reality of billions, but reality itself,” he writes.

The only measurement retired of this jam is to admit that our minds are often gullible. That intends that vigilance, uncertainty and humility are nan ways ahead, Ashton says.

If that sounds bleak, see nan greater arc of history: While this existent property of hatred, arsenic Ashton describes modern online vitriol, is simply a measurement back, it is besides “a reaction, a backlash, a squeal of dismay, a counterrevolution encouraged and exploited by powerful people.” That guidance is up against a multitude of different narratives. Today’s proliferation of stories, Ashton writes, clasp powerfulness to show “the heterogeneous beauty and glory of each humanity.”

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