The Storyteller

"The storyteller is the most powerful person in the world."

- Steve Jobs

The authors state that storytelling may have been pivotal in organising human social behaviour by promoting co-operation, spreading co-operative norms and representing punishment of norm-breakers.

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These storytellers were essential in promoting co-operative and egalitarian values before comparable mechanisms evolved in larger agricultural societies, such as moralising high-gods.

To my mind, this triggers warps fast forward to our past and present future rummaging in the iterations of Marshall Mcluhan's "The medium is the message" and Seth Godin's Tribes. Imagining Plato's allegory of the cave, the ancient chanters in anthropology who brought history and the law from generation to generation, the ubiquity of connectivity and XR, the prosumers , the factors which drive Industry 4.0 and what is to come. The influence of storytelling in networks that shape cultures and subcultures from evolutionary biology.

On why content and how it is told is always king.

"This is not to say that people deliberately or consciously tell stories to pass down knowledge or to keep their communities together. “My guess is that they would say it’s fun,” says Migliano. That’s why individuals choose to tell stories on a moment-to-moment basis—it’s what biologists call the “proximate cause” of a behavior. But it’s the broader benefits—the “ultimate causes” like transmission of knowledge or inculcation of values—that might explain why storytelling arose in the first place."

Cecile G. Tamura