BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2001 > May
The Uses Of Storytelling
By Jon Udell
May 24, 2001
(Telling A Story
: Page 2 of 3 )
There's one talent common to all these creative disciplines: storytelling.
We are, as a species, hardwired not only for language but for narrative. A story is, you might say, an evolutionary mechanism designed to focus the attention of a group. Sometimes the point is to entertain, sometimes to teach, often both. The power of narrative, whatever its purpose, flows from a deep human need to identify with a group, and above all to find out what happens next. What's this got to do with virtual teams? Perhaps quite a lot, I concluded last week. The distributed project I mentioned was under intense time pressure, but lacked focus. Documents were flying around in e-mail crossfire. Phone conferences dragged on as people rooted through their inboxes. Days were passing. The project needed its own weblog, and I needed to write it.
Weblogging, or blogging, has emerged as a genuinely new literary/journalistic form. The narrative structure of a weblog is that of a daily diary. The style is one of commentary -- that is, a weblog refers to the readable Web, focuses attention on selected items, and tells a story about those items from a particular point of view.
The Web's leading blogger is clearly Dave Winer, who has for years pursued parallel careers as a software developer and storyteller (or, he might say, technology journalist). Not coincidentally, Dave's product, Manila, lets others do likewise. The connection between these two activities at first seems unlikely, perhaps because blogging can look more like a form of entertainment than like a tool for goal-oriented business communication. I stressed the latter use of blogging in a paper I wrote last year on Internet groupware for scientific collaboration. In that paper, I made a remark that drew some heat from Dave and from Previous page Page 2 of 3 Next page
BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2001 > May
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