Not a hero

I asked Cris about his favorite kind of stories and he said:

I love stories where

the storyteller isn’t the hero.

Other people have said things like this, too. Some of David’s advice for new storytellers was:

Don’t try

and make yourself a hero

when you really weren’t the hero of the story.

A memorable story that Shannon described involves the storyteller not being a hero:

The best moments are when somebody --

I remember

there was a guy,

who came for a while pretty regularly,

I think it was while you were still here,

you may remember him.

He got up and he told the story

about a time when he got so overwhelmed

by his life, that he

kicked his dog.

He was so honest,

and transparent,

and vulnerable in that moment.

I was just so grateful,

that's the kind of moment that I'm always looking for

when somebody just says the thing,

like you said,

that they would never say anywhere else

and they say it well.

And you feel like you've

unlocked

a little piece of understanding

about humanity

and the universe in a way that

nothing on Netflix is ever going to do.

She described this as being vulnerable. The storyteller revealed something that could really make you not like him.

Randy also indicated that the audience prefers stories in which the teller is not a hero:

We don't get so much

like we did in the early days

hero stories

where the teller

is the hero of the story.

Everything was so screwed up

and I came and

everything was fine.

Then

whenever you hear a story like that

[halfhearted clapping]

it's great [sarcastic].

If you hear a story like

everything was so screwed up

and I got in there and

I made it so much worse

and I don't know if I can ever fix it.

That story:

Yeah!

I can relate to that!

Randy got at why I think the unhero stories are so appealing. They are relatable. I wonder sometimes if reality storytelling is a reaction to social media, where people often share only the best of themselves.

Vacker and Gillespie (2013) discuss understanding of the world and self, looking at Chaco Canyon petroglyphs, the Hubble telescope, and Facebook. Their application of the “laws of media” (McLuhans, 1988) to the Hubble Space Telescope might look like this (they do not explicitly discuss obsolescence):

Hubble Space Telescope

Enhances (extends): “the electronic eye and the consciousness” (p. 42).	Reverses into: Facebook, inward gaze. Overload occurs because “spectral photography challenges the centrality of the human viewer by showing a universe of vast size, scale, and age” (p. 42).
Retrieves: “the petroglyph, the campfire, and the night sky lost to electric light in the metropolises” (p. 42).	Obsolesces: the human-centric universe.

Vacker and Gillespie have a dismal view of civilization comprised of humans who would rather perpetuate the fantasy that they are the center of the universe, through Facebook, than respond with “ecological awareness, and a sense of shared destiny” to our actual place in the universe, as occurred, briefly after the Earthrise image captured by Apollo 8 in 1968 (p. 43). However, Facebook, like the Hubble Telescope, contains the seeds of its own reversal. A possible tetrad of Facebook:

Facebook

Enhances: projection of self. Physical image, thoughts, actions.	Reverses into: isolation, loneliness. Constantly connected, but not connected.
Retrieves: small town. Everyone knows everyone else’s business.	Obsolesces: privacy.

Reality storytelling is a natural antidote to Facebook overload. Although Facebook allows individuals to be more connected to more people than ever before in some ways, people access Facebook through a computer, a phone. They look not into the eyes of another human being, but a glowing screen. They access Facebook alone.

Furthermore, people have a tendency to post the “best” of themselves on Facebook. Zhao, Grasmuck, & Martin (2008) found that “regardless of levels of sophistication, Facebook users in our sample all attempted to project a self that is socially desirable” (pp. 1826-1827).  People listening to these un-hero could develop a sense of “we’re in this together” whereas Facebook users are left feeling that their struggles with human existence are unique. They struggle alone.

McLuhan, M., & McLuhan, E. (1988). Laws of media: The new science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Vacker, B., & Gillespie, G. (2013). Yearning to be the center of everything, when we are the center of nothing: The parallels and reversals in chaco, and facebook. Telematics and Informatics, 30, 35-46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2012.03.005