Episode Transcript

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, founder and director of the Future of StoryTelling. Welcome to the FoST Podcast. Back when we were starting the Future of StoryTelling in 2011, I read Frank Rose's book, The Art of Immersion, how the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, in the way we tell stories. The book profoundly shaped not only how I think about media, but also what FoST would become. Frank's ideas made me rethink the nature of the relationship between the audience and media creators. I understood then that the fall summit shouldn't be structured as an audience sitting in a dark auditorium, passively being lectured down to, but rather should be a participatory immersive and co-created experience.

Frank Rose has a long history of thinking and writing about media. He was a contributing editor to Wired Magazine for nearly a decade. Currently, he's a senior fellow at Columbia University School of the Arts, where he also founded and leads the digital dozen awards for Breakthroughs in Story Time. When he released his new book last year, The Sea We Swim In: How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World, I dove in with great enthusiasm. The book draws on the latest cognitive psychology and neuroscience to explain how we see and make sense of the world using stories and how they are as ubiquitous and essential as the air we breathe. I am delighted to welcome Frank Rose to the podcast.

Frank Rose, it's such an honor and delight to have you on the FoST Podcast. Welcome.

Frank Rose:

Thank you, Charlie. It's really great to be here and an honor for me as well.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I should just say, Frank, that I owe you personally a huge debt of gratitude that your book was the key to unlocking so many questions that I had struggled with when I was trying to start a conference, start the summit, The Future of StoryTelling. Literally, your book was one of the couple of things that I read at that time that opened up a whole new way to think about a storytelling and how the internet was impacting the way we communicate, the nature of audience, the changing nature of the audience, the blurring lines between media, that they were all stories. I mean, all of that was hugely influential in the formation of The Future of StoryTelling, and for that, I really thank you.

Frank Rose:

Thank you, Charlie. That's really great to hear because the reason I wrote that book, The Art of Immersion in the first place was because I was reporting on stuff all at the intersection of media and technology. And at a certain point, I began to realize that the way people were telling stories was changing in response to digital technology. I didn't really understand it at the time, but I had, I guess, faith in my ability to figure it out eventually. And that's why I wrote the book.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, again, that simple idea that the audience was going from a spectator, and I should say, audience or customer, consumer, you interchanged a lot of words there, was going from a passive consumer to an active participant. I mean, that was, and is, revolutionary. It was, and is, what's literally happening, I think, even more so being played out and proved out in the world. And it had me rethink the nature of what a gathering, a live gathering, should be. We literally reworked the whole notion and instead made The Future of StoryTelling based around having round table conversations where the speaker was there at the table, and everybody could be part of the discussion and it would be co-created in the room because of you.

Frank Rose:

Well, thank you. I mean, you certainly captured it precisely. And that idea of the round table discussions being at the heart of what The Future of StoryTelling summit is, I've always thought that was just brilliant. It makes a huge difference and it really distinguishes FoST from everything else.

Charlie Melcher:

And then the other thing that really opened my mind, which again, I guess I instinctively maybe knew, but just that different media were actually blurring together. Like these silos that we had grown up in, where I was in publishing, and somebody else was in film and television, and somebody else was in advertising and, "Never shall the Twain meet." You know, when no one was supposed to talk to each other. And in The Art of Immersion, you just said, "Hey, this is all storytelling," and these lines between these silos, which maybe developed because of the means of production and the cost associated, the industrial cost of making books, or making movies, or whatever, had people specializing and focusing. But when we were all free to be in the world of zeros and ones, and in that even plane of digital, then those distinctions really didn't need to be there. And we were all storytellers.

Frank Rose:

Exactly. And partly, it was about the means of production, but it was also about the means of reception, if you will. It used to be that if you wanted to watch a TV show, you had to turn on the TV. And if you wanted to go to a movie, you had to go to a movie theater. And if you wanted to read a newspaper, you had to pick up the newspaper from your driveway, or the newsstand, or whatever. And that's all been replaced now. It's all on a screen and the screen will show anything and everything that you want it to. So yeah, there's really no distinction anymore between those kinds of media.

Charlie Melcher:

So now, was incredibly excited to receive in the mail last year, the new book that you wrote, a decade following, called The Sea We Swim In: How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World. And this was your, if you will, a followup, in a way, to The Art of Immersion. I guess I should just start by asking what was the inspiration for writing this and what are you hoping to accomplish with the new book?

Frank Rose:

A couple of years after The Art of Immersion came out, I was invited to create an executive education program at Columbia University on storytelling. And around that time, I began to think I ought to create a toolkit for people who are taking this program. The bulk of the book is something that I created for the exec ed program called The Nine Key Elements of Story, which is how I choose to break down the whole craft of storytelling, regardless, as you say, regardless of the medium. But then I wrapped it in a couple of other parts. First, the research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology into how we process stories, which is totally fascinating to me.

Charlie Melcher:

That's the part that I just totally love. And I wonder if we could start with that a little bit, just as the book starts by telling us a little bit about the psychologist, Jerome Bruner and the work he did with his Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard.

Frank Rose:

The reason the book is called The Sea We Swim In is because I became aware of Bruner and his seminal work in storytelling and understanding storytelling. What was fascinating about Bruner to me was, first, he was such a rebel. He was a rebel against behaviorism when he was at Harvard and BF Skinner, the father, of course, of behaviorism was the head of the department at Harvard. Behaviorism said, "We can't understand what's going on in the brain. We don't know what's going on in your head. So we'll just study behavior." That was ultimately a dead end.

And we now have mapped much of the brain and we can certainly get a sense of what's going on in there. And a lot of that has to do with stories. And this was another way that Bruner rewired the way that we think about these things, because in 1985, he published a book in which he basically made the case that there are two modes of thought. One was the mode of thought that people have been studying for centuries, which is logic and reasoning and so forth. And what Bruner did was to say, "Well, that's important, but equally important is this other mode of thought, which is stories, storytelling."

Charlie Melcher:

And he called it narrative thinking, is that right?

Frank Rose:

Yes. Right. I brought the term narrative thinking to bear on it because I saw it as analogous to design thinking in the sense that design thinking means taking the tools of professional designers and making them available to people who aren't professionals, like corporate executives. And narrative thinking means taking the tools of professional storytellers, film directors, journalists, television writer/producers, that sort of thing, and making them available to people who aren't professionals and who don't intend to become professionals, but who are now storytellers. Because now in the digital age, we're all storytellers. We're no longer that passive audience that was supposed to sit back and shut up and watch the TV.

Charlie Melcher:

I loved what you had summarized of Bruner's in the book, which is that he was stating that our very sense of reality is shaped, if not defined, by stories and that that reality is a construct and narratives, the chief means of construction.

Frank Rose:

Yes, Bruner was very much of the opinion that we construct our own reality. Yes, maybe there's some kind of objective reality out there, but we're not privy to it because the only way we can determine what reality might be is through our senses, through what happens in our heads. For example, we know that there are colors out there beyond the visible spectrum. That's why they're called infrared and ultraviolet. We know that there are sounds that other animals can hear, but we cannot. So Bruner was of the opinion that we create our own sense of reality. He believed also that stories are really critical to that. The stories are the key to our belief systems.

The other thing that's critical here, I think, in which Bruner is key to, is this sense that we don't even see the stories around us. That's what the title means, The Sea We Swim In is actually inspired by a quote which I got from one of Bruner's book, where he says, "We live in a sea of stories. And like the fish who, according to the proverb, will be the last to discover water, we have our own difficulties grasping what it is like to swim in stories." In other words, we just don't see this stuff. We take it for granted. It's like we don't see the air that we breathe and stories have the same effect.

Charlie Melcher:

That's a perfect segue into this whole idea of immersion. And what does it really mean to be immersed? What is your definition of immersion?

Frank Rose:

My concept of immersion really comes from Janet Murray, who is at Georgia Tech and who more than 20 years ago, well over 20 years ago, wrote an incredibly perceptive book called Hamlet on the Holodeck about how digital technology was going to change the way we tell stories. But she called immersion, she referred to it as, "The sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air." And we have always had a tendency to immerse ourselves in stories to want to kind of lose ourselves in stories, and this law predates digital.

It's why when you're reading a really great novel, you're on the train, you're liable to miss your stop. And if we go back several centuries, it's why Cervantes wrote Don Quixote as a satire of a man who lost his mind from reading too much. He got so immersed in this new medium of reading of books, which had barely existed before, he got so lost in it that he lost his mind and went tilting at windmills. So we've always had this tendency to immerse ourselves and also this fear of becoming too immersed. But I've found that immersion is something that we increasingly seem to crave.

Charlie Melcher:

Yes. And there's so many things in the book that you talk about that are reflective of how that's evolving with new technologies. Certainly we all know about VR and AR and the opportunity to get even more lost in other worlds, even more submerged to use the water metaphor. One of the things I loved that you talked about is even just what it means, the definition of the word media, which I had never actually known. Tell us the definition, where does media come from?

Frank Rose:

Right. Media comes from the Latin word for middle. And so the media that you are experiencing when you read a book, or watch a TV show, or watch a TikTok video, or whatever, the medium is what's coming between you and what's actually happening in the story. It's the screen, it's the technology that conveys the story to you. Media can really be seen in two entirely different ways. On one hand, it's a window. It's a window into other people's lives. And it's one of the most critical things, I think, it is to understand about media today.

Charlie Melcher:

It's very much about where media's headed today, which is going to experiences that are actually unmediated experiences, where we are getting closer to being in the story and experiencing it directly without something in the middle. It seems to me that so much of immersive experience and entertainment these days is really aspiring to being able to give people that direct experience and have it be unmediated. I mean, I think that media's looking to replace itself.

Frank Rose:

Right, exactly. No, I think that's absolutely true.

Charlie Melcher:

So why do you think that co-creation is something that we desire? Why are people looking to be as much makers of their stories as they are consumers?

Frank Rose:

That's a great question and the answer is actually pretty simple, I think. The answer is because we are natural co-creators anyway. It used to be assumed that back in the 20th century, when we were all experiencing conventional media, it used to be assumed that our role was to kind of sit back and shut up and let the TV show, or the ad, or whatever, just sort of flow over us, and we would be passive receptors. One of the most important findings, I think, of all this cognitive science research in the past 25 or 30 years, that's basically untrue. That's not how anybody experiences anything. We're not passive receptors. We are, even if we are appearing to be passive, we are actually co-creating the experience, the story in our brains with the actors, with whoever. And so we have this natural desire to be co-creators because that's what we do all the time anyway. Without that, we wouldn't be able to experience stories at all.

Charlie Melcher:

It makes me think of the work of Clay Shirky and his book, Cognitive Surplus. And he talked about that very thing, that it was the delay in the evolution of technology that kept us from being able to have two-way mass media. It wasn't because we didn't want to co-create or have a role to play, it's simply that mass media was unidirectional, we had no other option. But as soon as the internet came, it opened up a two-way medium and unleashed Pandora's box, a flood of people finally wanting to be able to express themselves. I know you talk about that in the book too, that there seem to be more people interested in making videos or movies, and writing books, and creating their own photographs and content, almost than there are people wanting to consume them. It seems maybe after so many decades of being denied our natural instincts to create, we now will not be denied. There's a tremendous desire to tell our own stories.

I am very curious to hear your thoughts about where this is headed, this explosion of people who want to tell their own stories and create their own content and put it out there. I mean, certainly a lot of people would argue classic filmmakers, or authors, or photographers, that most of that content is not very good and it just waters down the value of the good stuff. Do you think that that's true?