Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction sounds like a book I’d put at the top of my reading list. It’s hot off the press, just released by Routledge in November 2011 so I immediately surfed over to Amazon to see if I could buy a copy. Alas, the academic publisher has not embraced the digital world. It’s not available for e-readers, and even with Amazon’s discounting, the hard copy would set me back $111.37 before taxes. I’ll order it via interlibrary loan, but if your book budget is higher than mine, don’t wait.

For anyone as intrigued by storytelling in social media as I, this new work by Ruth Page sounds like a fascinating exploration of the phenomena. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s description on the Routledge Web site:

The online stories are profoundly social in nature, and perform important identity work for their tellers as they interact with their audiences – identities which range from celebrities in Twitter, cancer survivors in the blogosphere to creative writers convening storytelling projects or local histories.

Stories and Social Media brings together the stories told in well-known sites like Facebook and lesser-known community archives, providing a landmark survey and critique of personal storytelling as it is being reworked online at the start of the 21st century.

Reading that sent me in search of more about Ruth Page, and I found her Digital Narratives blog, with its wealth of observations and insight. Page is a lecturer in Birmingham, focusing on digital narrative and the impact of gender on storytelling. Her research has uncovered differences between the way women and men tell their stories through social media and also in the ways celebrities use Twitter.

A review of Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction for Science Daily quotes her:

The study shows an increasing trend for using ‘expressive language’ in Facebook (for example, for emphasis or to project friendliness), which is being led by young women aged between 19 and 25 years. Between 2008 and 2010, for example, the style used by young women was later picked up by other women, especially those over 40 years old, and by teenage boys; but not by men.

The role of young women as leaders of the changes in the styles of storytelling in social media is significant as it is at odds with other statistics that show that they are under-represented as the developers of social media sites and software.

Page also looks at the way celebrities use social media. While many use it only to promote their work, others, such as Jamie Oliver, make a more personal connection with followers. Again from the Science Daily review:

At the time I was looking at Twitter for this book, he was promoting his Food Revolution tour in the US. Many tweets are telling the Followers to join the campaign, watch a programme, try a recipe etc. (more or less selling his products) but all of that is countered by his efforts to engage with the followers by writing back to them, telling snippets of his family life and so on.

I’ve embraced social media. Though I’ve sampled a lot of others, I’ve settled on a handful: WordPress (for blogging), Facebook, and Twitter. I’m a fan and regular user of Scoop.it which makes it easy to share links in a curated form that is like an online newsletter. I know that the choices of what I share through those social media outlets tell my story. They don’t tell everything, of course, but they leave a trail of breadcrumbs that are easy to follow. They reveal a lot about what is important to me and how I see the world.

The turnaround for me was blogging. I avoided it for a long time because it seemed narcissistic. Besides, with the number of blogs exploding daily, I couldn’t see the need for yet one more.

An eight-month trip to Australia changed my mind. Blogging became an easy way to respond to the “tell us what you’re experiencing” requests from friends. I could post to Crossroads and send out a brief e-mail. Friends who really did want to know about our trip could read it. Everyone else could ignore it.

I was hooked. As someone with a passion for storytelling and a definition of it that is broad and inclusive, I came to appreciate the possibilities of telling our stories online in a way that mirrors another quote from Ruth Page in the ScienceDaily review:

“Although there is a lot of talk about how digital technologies will lead to the end of the book, social media shows us that storytelling remains a key way of how we make sense of each other.”

Lips on face stone sculpture, photo by Photos8.com

In the August 8, 2011, online edition, he throws out a challenge to culture workers. He calls on those in media, education, religion and the arts to use their influence to tell a new story. He writes, “For better or worse, you are engaged in crafting and propagating the cultural stories that serve either to legitimate the devastation the old economy causes or shine a light on the possibilities of the new economy.”

Whether we stand in front of an audience or work in the broad field of organizational narrative, storytellers bear a responsibility that is, at the same time, an exciting opportunity. Our stories can shore up a status quo that keeps the world teetering on the brink of global disaster. Or they can engender a sense of possibility that will lead us to something sane and life-affirming.

I’m reminded of the four levels folklorist Barre Toelken once told me characterized Navajo storytelling. That was many years ago, and my memory has likely shifted the explanations to fit my own sense of the impact of storytelling. But roughly, these are the four levels:

• Entertainment: The first task of the storyteller is to capture the audience’s imagination.
• Education: Once imagination is focused, learning can begin.
• Spirituality: Here the possibility of transformation begins.
• Witchcraft: Only a shaman can safely tell stories at this level because they unleash forces that cannot be contained in less skilled hands.

From many directions we hear stories that seem to have skipped right over the third level and are wreaking havoc on our environment, economies, and family lives. They are told by culture workers who have sold their talents for pieces of silver, skilled liars whose arguments play out in election campaigns and corporate marketing.

Korten’s charge to artists is one storytellers can answer:

“Talented artists can help us see beauty, meaning, and possibility where it may otherwise escape our attention. They can take us on an imaginary journey to a future no one has yet visited to experience possibilities we may not have imagined. Our movement needs the contribution of millions of artists devoted to liberating human consciousness.”

The YES! essay is based on the 2nd edition of David Korten’s important and encouraging book, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth.

Doctor and patient in City Hospital Tuberculosis Division, 1927 (Item 2721, Engineering Department Photographic Negatives (Record Series 2613-07), Seattle Municipal Archives, from Flickr Creative Commons)

In his 2009 book, Technological Medicine: The Changing World of Doctors and Patients, Reiser wrote, “Before stethoscopes, the coin of evaluation was words—the doctor learned about an illness from the patient’s story of the events and sensations marking its passage.”

Diagnoses were often made via letters. Patients wrote detailed descriptions of their symptoms, the remedies they had tried, and their emotional state. Not every physician was comfortable with this. Some complained of patients’ inabilities to accurately describe their illnesses. Others chided doctors for subtly guiding the narratives and missing the correct diagnosis.

In 1816 René Laennic, a 35-year-old French doctor, invented an instrument that would allow him to listen to a woman’s chest without violating her modesty. The stethoscope quickly became popular and “took the mantle of illness out of the hands of patients and placed it in the doctor’s orbit.” (Reiser)

When Dr. Goldman interviewed him for White Coat Black Art, Reiser said the stethoscope “led to a seismic shift in how doctors evaluated illness and their relationship with the patient, which changed as they became more interested in the evidence from the body and less interested in the evidence from the story.” The new technology “made doctors more interested in the physical findings of disease than in the life of the patient.”

Reiser is concerned that over-reliance on technology has lessened physicians’ openness to the patient as a whole person rather than a collection of symptoms. But there’s a movement toward storytelling in medicine, generally referred to as “narrative medicine”.

Narrative medicine is, in many ways, a return to pre-stethoscope days. Dr. Rita Charon, who coined the phrase in 2000, describes it as “medicine practised by someone who knows what to do with stories”. In “What to do with stories: The sciences of narrative medicine”, she writes, “Whether sick or well, the reader of an illness narrative is summoned by the author to join with the teller—to form community that can combat the isolation of illness.” [Canadian Family Physician August 2007 vol. 53 no. 8 1265-1267]

Illness is a lonely journey, particularly when it’s chronic or when the impact is life threatening. It’s lonely for the person who is ill and for those who are caretakers. Narrative medicine takes this into account, placing the illness in the context of a life rather than the narrow confines of symptoms.

The full title was “Stories, Neuroscience and Experimental Technologies (STORyNET): Analysis and Decomposition of Narratives in Security Contexts.” The hosting agency was the Defense Sciences Office (DSO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Here’s the description:

This workshop is intended as a precursor to exploring the neurobiological mechanisms which undergird narrative processing so as to establish fertile ground for connecting our understanding of the neuropsychology of stories with models, simulations and sensors salient to security concerns. To this end, the workshop will focus on surveying theories of narrative, understanding what role they play in security domains, and establishing the state of the art in story analysis and decomposition frameworks.

If you remember Orwell’s 1984, you may recognize an unnerving similarity to the Ministry of Truth and its Fiction Department. One of the first things the novel’s government had to do was normalize a new language. Newspeak turned ordinary stories on their head.

Wandering through the DARPA Web site, where war is normalized as nothing more alarming than business strategizing, I got to thinking about George W. Bush on “weapons of mass destruction”, Sarah Palin putting cross hairs on the districts of pro-health care reform Democrats or the Harper government’s decision to scrap the long-form census because it was “coercive and intrusive”.

What all three examples have in common is a defective story with serious ramifications. Soldiers and civilians continue to die in Iraq. Palin supports powerful forces working to keep Americans from having universal health care. The Harper government’s decision to scrap the longer census means there will be inadequate information on which to base policy and funding decisions. When questioned about their actions, Bush, Palin and Harper all created new stories to explain how right they were.

George Orwell explained how it works in his appendix to 1984, “Principles of Newspeak”:

When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable.

I believe in the power of story but acknowledge its knife cuts both ways. We owe it to our children and to the seventh generation to avoid Newspeak, to tell stories that shed light, that inform, that inspire and that, ultimately, lead to a better world.

Still, the stories are layered and rich, even in English. This one seems sadly appropriate for the week after a crazed gunman in Arizona opened fire on Congresswoman Gabrielle Griffins. As I type, she lies in a hospital, a bullet hole through her head. Six others died.

It’s the day of their memorial service. Sarah Palin is accusing her opponents of “blood libel” for objecting to her placing shooting targets, aka crosshairs, on a map of Democrats (including Giffords) who voted for health care. President Obama is flying to Tucson to attend the service. His 2008 election unleashed a flood of racism and rhetoric that heightened the pervasive fear broken open by the attacks of September 2011.

The tragic shooting is leading to a lot of soul searching in a nation where bombast has replaced rational discussion in all too many arenas. Mainstream and independent media are filled with discussions about mental health, gun control, political discourse, social justice, and the need for civility.

The simple tale of a mouse and a kitten is ostensibly about two creatures who are predator and prey by nature. Their coming to that realization is normal, in the scheme of things. However, folktales are never about the surface story. Children are not born knowing who is predator and prey. They are not born recognizing The Other as enemy. This little story points out the problem, not the solution, but perhaps it can lead to some open discussion about tolerance and accepting differences.

Here, from the storyteller who gave me Man with No Brain and Habra with the Lion, comes the tale of the little mouse and the kitten.

One day, a little mouse said to his mother, “I’m big now. Let me go outside and play on my own. It’s not fair to keep me cooped up in this hole.”

The mouse’s mother had always watched over him carefully. She feared the dangers that threaten small mice. Most of all, she feared the cat, who would pounce on her child and eat him.

But at last, seeing how much her son had grown and how keen he was to explore the outside world, she agreed. “Very well, but don’t stay outside too long, and, above all, beware of the cat. He is our greatest enemy.”

The little mouse was thrilled. At last his dream was coming true. He was going outside alone, with no parents to scold him.

The little mouse was outside on his own, for the very first time (Photo by Som Juan, somjuan's Flickr Photostream)

He ran outside, cheerful and proud. He felt like a grown-up mouse. He could go anywhere he wished, all by himself. He scurried around. Sometimes he stopped and raised his head, looking to the left, then to the right. Then he ran back and forth, delirious with happiness.

He was full of his new-found joy when he saw a little cat. “Oh, hooray,” he said to himself. “I can have a nice friend if this pretty little creature will play with me.”

The kitten was also out on his own for the very first time. As soon as he saw the little mouse, he said to himself, “What a pretty, sweet little creature. If only he wants to play with me!” He approached the little mouse as softly as he could.

The little mouse was delighted. “Do you want to play with me?”

The cat replied, “Yes, I do!”

The two young animals began to play tag. They wrestled and rolled on the ground. They boxed with their paws. They bit each other’s ears. They ran around in circles, chasing each other’s tails, but always gently, delighted with their game.

Tomorrow we'll meet again and play like we did today (Photo by Buffa from thebuffafamily Flickr Photostream)

They forgot everything else until the sun began to set. The little mouse said to the kitten, “That’s enough for now. I’m afraid Mama will scold me. Goodbye.”

The kitten replied, “I’m sorry we have to stop. Goodbye. But tomorrow morning we’ll meet again and play like we did today.”

The little ones returned to their homes. When the mouse saw her son, she was relieved.

“Where were you, my child? I was so afraid for you. You were gone the whole day. I was very worried. I was afraid the cat had devoured you. Never stay outside such a long time! It’s not safe.”

But the little mouse was full of the day’s fun. He was impatient with his mother’s warnings. Finally he interrupted, “Oh, if I told you everything… I made a friend. We played together all day long. Oh, Mother, if you could see how cute he is, how handsome, how friendly. I’m sure you would like him. From now on, when I go outside, I won’t be alone. Now I have a friend to play with, from morning till night.”

His mother grew thoughtful. “Yes, my son, that’s good. That’s good. But tell me a little about your friend. Can you describe him to me?”

“Oh, Mama, if you only saw him! It’s true he’s a little bigger than I am but not too much. And his head is a little large and round. And his fur is as soft as silk, so nice to stroke. And he is yellow, and his tail is about that long and thick. And he doesn’t talk the way we do. It’s so pretty to hear him. He says, ‘Me…ow! Me…ow! Me…ow!’ Or he says, ‘Me…ew! Me…ew! Me…ew!’”

Mother Mouse was no longer listening. She had nearly fainted. What she had dreaded most had happened. It was a miracle her child was still alive.

“My dear child, your little friend is a cat! Creatures like that eat mice. He must still be very small and not yet know that mice are his daily food. But beware. His parents will tell him. Don’t go near him again.”

The little mouse didn’t understand a thing his mother said. How could such a sweet little friend ever think of eating him? He turned to his father.

Father Mouse laughed softly. Finally he said, “My little son, cats are our most dangerous enemies. Listen to your mother. Stay inside, safe from the cat. We’re warning you for your own good.”

That was the scene in the mouse’s home. Now let’s see what happened when the kitten went home. His mother was also upset and asked why he had stayed outside so long.

The kitten said, “Dear Mother, if you’d only seen the little friend I met. He’s so handsome, so cute. We played together all day long. We pretended to fight. He bit me; I bit him. He made me fall down. I made him fall down. I’m so lucky to find a good friend. I’ll never be alone when I go outside to play.”

Mother Cat was delighted to see her child so happy. Finally, she said, “Tell us about your pretty little friend.”

Little fool, and you didn't eat him? (Photo by Kevin Dooley from kevindooley's Flickr Photostream)

“Oh, Mama, if you saw him! He is little, much smaller than I am. He has a pretty, thin little tail. His little head isn’t round like mine. But he has such a pretty nose, narrow and pointed. His ears are pointed too, and so small. And he doesn’t talk like us. He says softly, ‘squeak, squeak’.”

“Little fool,” said his mother. “And you didn’t eat him? That was a mouse! And mice, you little nitwit, are what we eat. Do you understand? Cats eat mice. Always. And you actually had a mouse between your paws and let it get away and are proud of yourself? I am ashamed to have such a stupid child. Tomorrow, you must look for him. As soon as he is near, pounce. Grab him and gobble him up. Do you understand?”

The kitten could not believe his ears. “Eat him? But why? And then who would I play with?”

His father burst out laughing. “My son, listen to your mother. Cats eat mice and have since the world began. Tomorrow we will see what kind of cat you are. As soon as the little mouse comes near, jump on him and devour him. Show us that you are a real cat.

When morning came, the kitten went outside in search of the little mouse. But there was no trace of the mouse anywhere. Not in the courtyard. Not in the street.

Then the kitten saw a tiny hole. He watched it carefully and recognized the shiny eyes of his little mouse friend, safe inside his home.

In his sweetest, slyest voice, the kitten said, “Hello. Come on out, and we’ll play as we did yesterday.”

But the little mouse cried out, “Never! Everything your father and mother told you yesterday, my father and mother told me.”

And so the story ends, of the mouse who learned about cats and the kitten who learned about mice.

Children can be taught fear. They can also be taught compassion and tolerance. (Photo by Denis Defreyne, Flickr Creative Commons)

A post script: In an opinion piece in the January 11th issue of the New York Times, Robert Wright has this to say: “The point is that Americans who wildly depict other Americans as dark conspirators, as the enemy, are in fact increasing the chances, however marginally, that those Americans will be attacked.” His piece is aptly titled: “First Comes Fear”.

I’d stopped by for a visit to a lovely home in a decidedly upper-middle-class area of Seattle. On my way up to the door, I spied a big, grey rat scurrying among the garden plants. Since rats are ubiquitous, I didn’t find anything unusual about it.

The friend I was visiting was offended when I mentioned the rat. Not her fault really. Rats have a bad reputation. When we think of rats in western cultures, we think of stories such as

• rats spreading plague in the dark days of the Black Plague
• the Pied Piper ridding Hamelin of rats by piping an enchanting tune
• scenes in horror films where hundreds of rats attack a bound victim
• rats stowing on board ships
• expressions such as “rat-faced”, “I smell a rat”, “rat on someone”, “dirty rat”

Rats are intelligent, social creatures. They don’t deserve their bad reputation. They need a new story that will rehabilitate their image. Maybe something that will make labs think twice about inflicting pain. A story that will bring respect to these much-maligned rodents.

And here it is. Bart Weetjens admires rats. He knows there are some things they do better than humans, like recognize odors. So he trained them and put them to work sniffing out land mines and tuberculosis. Turns out they trump humans and our machines many times over on both those tasks. And they ask little in return.

This TED video is twelve minutes long. Watch this, and you’ll have a new story about rats, a story that will make you look at them with respect.

This is important because so many of the stereotypes and misconceptions that divide us as people, that rip apart organizations and shatter families and plunge us into wars, are really a function of unhealthy, inaccurate, or incomplete stories. I’m not saying that telling a new story about rats would convince the fleas who feed on them not to spread diseases from rats to humans. I’m not naive enough to claim that if we all knew the stories of Osama bin Laden, Margaret Thatcher, Gandhi, and our next door neighbour, we’d usher in peace on earth.

But I do believe we’d be more careful with each other, our fellow creatures, and our planet if we acknowledged that our stories are always like the ones the blind men told about the elephant—predicated on our partial knowledge of any topic we broach.

The editing is a daily event. Something happens. We tell friends about it. Some parts of the story work. Others fall flat. Unless we’re completely oblivious to the reactions of others, we make mental notes of what worked and what didn’t, where people’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion, when they lost interest, and the times they were leaning forward as if they were gobbling every word we uttered.

Next time we pull out that story, we spin a version influenced by the first telling…or the first ten tellings. Eventually we settle into a version we’re happy with.

At that point additional edits are only slight tailorings for specific audiences. The story line and chosen details remain pretty much the same, and we carry that story around just waiting for an opportunity to share it.

Of course, some stories stop working for us. We move on, choose a new way of looking at our life, forgive our nemesis. So we drop the story from our repertoire or subject it to major revisions.

Ivan Doig turns it around in a way that delights me in Ride with Me, Mariah Montana. He writes: “Memories are stories our lives tell us.”

Of course, stories do more than help us figure out who we are at any given time. They also create—or divide—community. Harold Rosen once wrote:

That makes the stories we tell even more important. We live them, exchange them, and try to pair them with other stories in a never-ending dance. And how we tell them makes a difference, in our own lives, to our families and friends, and to the larger community.

Cathryn with ukelin, instrument from the thirties

There was a time when my ex and I took the stage as part of the cowboy poetry scene. For him, it was a dream come true. For me, it was fingernails on a blackboard. Not for the other poets we listened to, whose work came from a deep place, but for me. I was always a reluctant farmer and rancher. The inequity between outflow and inflow of cash gave me high blood pressure for the first time in my life.

Our colleagues on the circuit were completely smitten by the life. I was a reluctant participant.

Even a reluctant rancher cannot help but understand the role of cowboy poetry. The poems are stories of the land, of the life, of tragedy and joy, of comedy and pain, and, ultimately, of the meaning of life. On the British Columbia circuit, rhyming was preferred but not required. Cattle and horses were royal subjects. Sheep were an embarrassment.

Some of the "real" cowboy poets at the Prince George, BC, festival

I had always been in the camp that derided country music and cowboy poetry. I believed the mockery that if you played country music (and, for me, cowboy poetry) backward you got your wife back, your truck back, your dog back, etc.

My brief experience on the cowboy poetry circuit taught me how wrong I was. There was nothing cynical or shallow about the poems I heard. There was celebration of the land, the people, the animals. There was agony over weather, death, injury, illness, and financial losses.

The poems were stories. They were literate, elegiac, funny, mournful, celebratory. They were stories of a way of life that works its way deep into the soul.

Pioneer Ranch, my home for nine years

My ex and I had both sheep and cattle. I never bonded with the cows. I adored the sheep. Still, I’m grateful for all of it—the times when all plans were halted because we had to tend to a cow, sheep or pig in difficult labour, the hours spent stretching wire for new fences, the endless rounds on a tractor as we cut, baled, and brought in the hay, the magic of Northern Lights, the wary trust of wildlife.

So in that spirit, I share with you a song we recorded on “The Bull Rider’s Wife”, with thanks to talented lyricist Fred J. Eaglesmith. The song is a story, and the story still squeezes my heart.

13 Summerlea

Some of the dozens of journals and notebooks I haul with me every time I move

I lucked onto a short documentary on William Stafford. He’s long been one of my favorite poets. I remember the sense of loss I felt when he died. I still have a bright memory of a reading he did at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company, as well as the books I bought that night.

The quote below slipped by too quickly in the documentary. I caught most of the first sentence, none of the second.

Fortunately, a retired pastor, Muriel T. Stackley, knew the whole quote and posted it in an essay on the Mennonite Weekly Review. She wrote: “This comes from a 1990 lecture at Bluffton University in Ohio, drawing on notes from Stafford’s four years in camps for conscientious objectors to war.”

I’m posting the quote for three reasons:

• I’ll need to re-read it now and then. Maybe I’ll even memorize it and pull it out of my mental hat next time someone asks questions that show they’re mystified by my spending so much time on blogs that don’t add coins to my coffers.
• I have decades of journals and letters that I haul with me whenever I move. Not every entry or letter is worth saving, but many are, at least while I’m alive to enjoy them.
• In mining those journals and letters for stories to share on the blogs, I’m re-visiting my life. There are passages painful to read, but mostly I look back with gratitude at all I’ve experienced.

Keep a journal, and don’t assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy. Artists and peace workers are in it for the long haul and not to be judged by immediate results. Redemption comes with care. In our culture we can oppose but not subvert. Openness is part of our technique. ~ William Stafford

The ads are no less fun for that. Both tell stories. Both are engaging. Whether or not they are effective in selling beer is something only Carlsberg knows. The first video shows the two ads. The second shows us how the animators created the squirrel ad.

Our digital world puts the story making in the hands of anyone who can afford a computer, a camera, and editing software. I celebrate that because I believe in the power and importance of creativity.

Story making is in our DNA. We can contribute our unique perspectives without needing a stamp of approval, a publisher, a film or recording studio, or a contract.

Where the issue becomes dicey is where the truth of what we’re seeing counts. Consider health claims on processed foods, safety assurances by chemical companies, and promises from politicians.

Documents can be manipulated. Photographs can be cleverly edited. Sound recordings can be pieced together from clips to make someone say something entirely fictional. Research can be skewed.

I do my best not to add to the confusion. A friend has asked me repeatedly why I insist on tracking down the truth of a story before posting it on my blogs. “You’re a storyteller,” she says. “Why does it matter, if it’s a good story?”

That’s a good question. It matters to me because I get tired of the emotion-manipulating stories that prove to be false. I love fiction and appreciate the craft involved in creating a world that is believable from the first paragraph to the final page. But I don’t appreciate being hoodwinked, and I know that much of what comes to me in print or digital form intends to do just that.

I love the stories I find and that people send for my blogs, and I always check them out before posting them. I cannot give an iron-clad guarantee they are true, but I can guarantee I have done enough sleuthing to have confidence in them.

They express points of view. Everything does, even the most “objective” news report or scientific research or courtroom testimony. But they do not intentionally add to the web of deceit that keeps us from making truly informed decisions.