kip/bot/blog

“power is the ability not only to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person” - Chimamanda Adichie

This might be a top 5 TED talk, for its power, clarity of concept, and speaker presence. Nigerian novelist (and Booker shortlister) Chimamanda Adichie solves the riddle of the truth and incompleteness of stereotypes and biases, by exposing the “dangers of the single story.”

Listen to the talk, but here’s an example: Africa does have failed states, serious infrastructure problems, and the severest forms of economic hardship. That is a true story. But, for most people, it is either the only story they know, or they only know “different versions of [that] single story.” Since that story doesn’t include a thriving and growing African middle class (across many countries, of course), an African intelligentsia, and economic success stories, we remain stuck in our stereotypes. In addition to solving the riddle of stereotypes that are true (now they are stories that tell one truth and the charge is to learn the other stories), it also helps me personally get out of the prejudiced/non-prejudiced quandary. Too often conversations involving narrow cultural understandings (single story versions of a people or their lives) are polar: you have to confront the misconceiving as prejudice. While it is a prejudice, the cure is not solely about fixing a character flaw, it’s about expanding the story.

Adichie says single stories of Nigeria “flatten her experience” (around 13:11 in the video). Reading The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind was a huge revelation of how flat my understanding of Africa is. I have only known Africa from a policy perspective: the summary numbers and prose about famine, civil war, wasted aid, problems in education and information technologies. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind tells a range of stories in William KamKwamba’s life: two famines, going to school, playing as a boy, playing/hanging differently as a teenager, his experience of popular culture, the mixing of magic and science in his life, his curiosity and tinkering, simple family life. When I started reading the book, I was actually frustrated when the first several chapters had nothing to do with his windmills, but focused on his life. I wanted the other single story of his inspiring move against his economic condition.

The whole talk is fantastic, but one other great moment that lays it out when she illustrates the principle “if you want to dispossess a people, start the story with the word ’secondly’” and goes on to explain how you can tell the story of Native American starting with arrows (the secondly) rather than the arrival of Europeans, or start with the failure of the African state rather than the colonial creation of those states. This line starts around 10:00.

Ben Fry, creator of Processing (or Proce55ing for those that remember) and data viz guru at MIT, has an absolutely fascinating visualization of how Darwin changed the text of “The Evolution of Species” in the thirteen years following its publication.

The labels across the top are chapter numbers, the dashes underneath represent text from the book which you can see on mouse-over. The color bars indicate the different editions.

I called it fascinating on first look, but should probably be more measured or specific. I hate when we fail to distinguish between fact illustration (making a single thing visual) and data visualization (revealing previously unseen stories through a rich visual worth looking at several times). This falls somewhere in between. The final state of the chart, after the 6th, and lengthiest, revision does tell a story:

The most obvious part of the narrative is the addition of an entire section and extensive revisions to the final section in the 6th edition, indicating a structural bolstering of the argument and possibly responses to ten years of critique. The speckle patterns, small bits of color, show a lot of tinkering/revising in the first three editions. These all support Fry’s introductory point:

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime

I’m wondering, though, whether this illustration tells the story better than the text?

What does make it fascinating overall is the ability to mouse over the sections (the small gray and colored stripes) and read the text underneath. Might be a better tool (if the stripes were a little bit bigger and easier to mouse over) than it is a data viz.

This video is the kind of thing that originally got me excited about the web and new media tools: someone with a compelling story to tell has the tools to make it engaging and a channel for putting it out there and finding an audience. Leaving aside the politics, this piece adds up to something great even though the individual production values are so-so.

Today’s NYTimes had an intriguing ad in its masthead, which I actually clicked:

“Sponsors of Tomorrow” is a little cheesy, but as an avid reader of the Science Times and a techno-fetishist, ii was drawn to it. When I clicked it, I got the usual metaphor of a room and cluster of objects as a way to engage me:

As everyone knows, people, especially NYTimes readers, are afraid of technology, so you need to give them a “virtual space” to lower blood pressure and reduce techno anxiety. In fact, so scared is the audience that you want to avoid text, and let users explore the almost-engaging images presented. (But they’re not clickable!)

So, the piece leads with the Virtual Wind Tunnel. That sounds geeky/futuristic/cool enough to check out:

Again, because I am so techno-phobic, I am gently eased into a screen with a picture with an explanatory sentence. When I click to say “Yes, when I said I wanted to explore the virtual wind tunnel I really meant it, so take me to the fucking virtual wind tunnel already”, I get this:

Now, I might be getting somewhere. There are clickable things at the bottom of the screen! Time to learn how Intel is creating the future, sponsoring tomorrow, blowing my mind with the possibilities of integated electronics. So I click the banana:

Ha ha! Funny! The “Aero Dynamic status” of the banana is “Non-existent”! (In the full sized-version of the screen, the punch line, or rather the “pay-off”, is buried in the upper left corner, in type barely distinguishable from the atmospheric data in the upper left. So, yeah, the actual design is pretty bad too.)

What about the bunny man? Is he aerodynamic?

No!! He “Might as well be a brick wall”! And that concludes the interactivity of this Virtual Wind Tunnel. I get to click five different objects and read the copywriter’s jokes.

In fairness, I have to admit some professional jealousy. I once had Intel as a client and I dreamed of being able to tell customers the deeper story of the amazing things Intel does. The making of micro-processors is, once you look a little closer, fascinating and nearly miraculous. Why not build the brand by telling that story? So, when I see something like this, it bums me out cuz it’s a missed opportunity (and blown budget), and it’s just plain bad click-n-play interactive.

Some things I would suggest to the next team who gets a shot at this (assuming they haven’t poisoned the idea for the next crew):

Remember that interactive is more than just an on/off switch — this experience is essentially an animation player and a weak one at that. It offers no information, no opportunity to go deeper, and, most important, no chance for experimentation and what if. (Actually, for Intel, the most important miss is that this really doesn’t make Intel look that smart or future looking — no processing power was needed for the conclusions we drew. Without the benefit of a computer, a 4th grader who has held his hand out of the window of a moving car could surmise that the able-to-fly humingbird is more aerodynamic than a guy in a bulky suit, and that scientifically dimpled golf balls have more jump than a banana. They might not know why that is the case, but this experience doesn’t help them with that.)

Don’t assume your audience is as dumb as you are — that’s really rude, but I have to believe that the on-the-ground creative team, who grew up with technology, were ready to tell a much smarter, deeper story. I’m guessing that the ECD-level people, who still have troubles with Flickr and computer games and are outraged at what txting is doing to language, insisted that they were the voice of the customer and they were the bar for the level of dialogue — so keep it really simple.

Remember why you bought the space — you went to the NYTimes to engage serious-minded, reasonably intelligent people, so why not talk to them at that level? Even when David Pogue is at his cutesiest accessible, he gets into speeds and feeds and explains real things.

Broaden the range of emotions you engage — go beyond wow, giggle, smirk, cool!, ha! pleasing, soothing, and allow that there are other emotions that can engage people: fascination, the thrill of discovery, the satisfaction of learning, the empowering nature of knowledge. People, especially those in the NYT reader demographics, actually make big life decisions in their careers and education around things that fascinate them, spark their imagination, and make them think.

What a shame. Will agencies ever learn to do truly interactive experiences?

Studs Terkel slowly became a hero of mine, in the years when I was moving towards union work. I saw him in Eight Men Out playing a cigar-chomping sports writer covering the Black Sox series, and read excerpts of his book about World War II, one of the first celebrations of the “greatest generation”, but one which didn’t shy away from some of the grittier, nastier realities of the war.

He took a much greater space in my heart and mind when I saw him at Central Park Summerstage in 1989. He was ‘performing’ with John Sayles, who read from his fiction, including a scene of wives and girlfriends riding a bus to prison to visit their men (something which he handled with incredible warmth, sensitivity, and taste, as opposed to the hideously overwraught bus scenes from Oz).

Studs read from Working an oral history of employment in the US, conducted in the 1960s. One of the pieces he read was of a waitress he met in a restaurent. He introduced the piece by talking about Five Easy Pieces and the scene where Jack Nicholson harasses an uncooperative waitress (”what should I do with the chicken salad?” “carry it between your knees” with the soon-to-be-trademark Nicholson hiss.) After describing a bunch of younger people who hooted and whooped at Nicholson’s put-down, Studs got almost angry (but he was sparkly and elfin so it barely felt mad), “you damned little solecistic punks” I remember him saying and then he described the interview. Up on stage, he described the waitress as having a movement in her work that was like a dance (which he started to do), punctuated by small talk with regulars and kitchen staff. Then he read the piece which included details about her family, how she cared for her body, punished by work — it was moving and the thousands in the park were entranced. He went onto tell other stories including that of a 60+ year old couple who protested nuclear weapons and were serving time in separate jails — it was a ‘real love story’, according to Studs.

Listening to him talk is a treat — how he describes people, the stories he has, his own views on American politics, society, jazz, and baseball. What a treasure.

WFMT - Best of Studs Terkel

… as opposed to what marketing people define it as.

While I understand the importance of narrative and storytelling in the work of marketers and advertises, this is one of the cooptations/adaptations in the industry that really pains me. Like paradigm shifts, storytelling/narrative is a wondrous and powerful idea that is trivialized when it gets thrown about in business. A recent review in The Nation of Salman Rushdie’s Imaginative New ‘Enchantress of Florence’ is a wonderful re-grounding of what narrative and story really means to people. (It also reminds us that book reviewing can itself be an art form.)

The novel, on its fourth page, is finding its subject, and its subject is storytelling itself. The men are driven by hungers and thirsts, and so is the writing. In its greedy piling up of nouns–”hostelries, saloons, food stalls, and hawkers”; “Cloths, utensils, baubles, weapons, rum”–we feel the force of storytelling’s appetite for the world, its sheer sensual relish for the thingness of things. It is no surprise that the great compendiums of stories tend to swell virtually without limit: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the Decameron and the Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote and Gargantua and Pantagruel. This is the same impulse, of course–under stricter regulation in The Enchantress of Florence–that gives Rushdie’s greatest novels their girth.

I love the phrase “greedy piling up of nouns” and the sense of fullness the passage conveys. I’m also fond of how the review picks up on the importance of cities in stories and culture:

for Rushdie, the city is storytelling’s supreme subject. Delhi, Karachi, Cochin, New York, above all Bombay, the city of his childhood (”Back to Bom!” is Saleem’s happiest thought in Midnight’s Children), and London, the city of his maturity (”Ellowen Deeowen,” The Satanic Verses calls it, yoking Semitic and Indo-European divinities in a numinous pun on the spelling of the city’s name). The city, for Rushdie, is the place of variety, mystery, fortuity, possibility, conflict–all the elements that most make for good stories. It is the place where strange people live next door and unimaginable worlds are waiting to be discovered on the next block, a place that invites you, as the title of his latest essay collection urges, to “step across this line.”

City here, is more a gathering of people with broader-than-tribal coincidental affililiations, and therefore a place of discovery. Not to discredit the much- and recently-vaunted small towns (from which I come), but I love the sense of magic that surrounds stories, cities, and even trade in this review.

On the work-related side of this, those who bandy narrative and story about might still benefit from this definition (and the underlying energy) to get beyond the A to B nature of story. Story is too often seen as a distilled beginning, middle, and end with connective tissue. Here, it’s more rollicking, intricate, layered, recursive, and rich in bewildering detail.

I have Kindled Rushdie’s book and plan to get to it as soon as I find out what happens between Mister Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett.