The importance of learning

It may turn out that other species on Earth have developed a form of language, but there is no evidence that any species other than Homo Sapiens tells stories. The subject matter has varied greatly, from tales of giants, to tales of gods, onto romance, crime and adventure, down to the tales, homilies and diatribes pouring out of the many branches into which knowledge has been split by modern science.

The scientists might not be aware that they are engaged in story telling and might even deny it, fearing it might taint their work with the brush of subjectivity or, worse, with the whiff of fiction.

However, if you were to read Darwin or Stephen J Gould or Paul Davies or Stephen Weinberg, you would see that good science is the telling of a connected series of happenings, rising above the realm of data and information to give us access to learning and, sometimes, wisdom.

Stories come from within us and also shape us, as individuals, as communities, as nations and as a species. Stories carry the memes that make us who we are, generally in cooperation, but sometimes in conflict with our genes.

In the beginning, stories were painted on cave walls or told kinesthetically, with and through objects and rituals. Then, the spoken word took over. Skilled and highly respected individuals roamed the world connecting people and communities through their story telling. More recently, as alphabets were invented and the scribes assumed pre-eminence, stories were written on whatever material technology could supply. The bards were confined to the stage and then to the cinema and TV.

Despite the seeming prevalence of visual media, the printed word remains dominant. We consume almost twenty thousand times as much reading material as people did at the beginning of the printed book, in the Middle Ages. Ten billion books are produced each year[i].

Despite the appearance of great change, not much has changed, really, between the time of the scribe and the time of the printing press or of the e-book. Technology has made the written word cheaper to produce and cheaper to consume, but the creative process has remained largely unchanged.

This may not be so for much longer. It may be that the very nature of the creative process if being reshaped. A process that has been with us since our time in the caves is perhaps about to evolve into something new. There are straws blowing in the wind that presage that the times are changing, as a late 20th century bard used to tell us.

The growth of blogs (a neologism derived from "weblog") - and, to a lesser extent, of online publishing - is an indication that story telling is alive and well, but it is also an indication that peer to peer story telling is assuming greater significance. Intermediaries are being removed from the publishing supply chain and from the creative process and this may reshape the future of the book, of story telling and of the species.

If this topic is of interest, please have a look at this.

i. From Man, John. Alpha Beta. London: Headline Book Publishing, 2000.