Initial Thoughts about Narratives Initial Thoughts about Narratives By Paul Ford Results of a a brainstorming session. A late-night series of thoughts on names. For several years, I've been trying to make sense of narrative's place on the web , while creating web narratives during late evenings. I've come up with some basic thoughts, which I will now spew.
Narrative is an interface.
Stories, from the Illiad to articles in Harper's and episodes of The Sopranos , are first and foremost an efficient way of conveying news and discovery . There's as much discover in The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton as there is in an article in Science . Stories with high topical news value - bestsellers, newspaper articles, those texts that mirror the cultural moment, usually fade over time, as cultures change and adapt, but those with deeper news value, those where the storyteller has contextualized their work within a larger, 'universal' framework of human values, endure. But stories are always news. They are our interface into the data-storage computers in our skulls.