Storytelling now

In the course of calling around to talk to friends from throughout my life about my upcoming fundraiser for Josh Stein on Tuesday, October 6 at 7 pm (if you haven't signed up, here's the link), I got into a conversation about community and storytelling in the post-COVID world. He works in cultural production -- theater, dance, film, whatnot -- so he thinks about this stuff more than I do.

The next day I was reading in one of the many issues of Bloomberg Businessweek that pile up unread on the island in our kitchen an article about how Bollywood is dramatically changing how movies are made in India, how the big dance numbers at weddings and in streets are out and how small scenes are in, just because of constraints on production. No surprise, the production of new content is constrained everywhere by the logistics of production, which is hard on the producers and sort of hard on consumers too to the extent that we are locked in to our habitual viewing patterns and starved for diversion.

But for newly produced filmed and even staged content, the reduction in the number of people on stage may have a profound effect on the content itself: more people are alone and in small groups, therefore the focus and the themes must get smaller and focus more on the individual and her/his relationship to the whole. We are in a new age of chamber content. Just as Ian Watt, in his classic The Rise of the Novel, catalogs how the rise of broader literacy and broad distribution of printed content including via serialized publication of novels gives rise to a new type of bourgeois subject, a person who views herself as discrete and independent in the world and identified with others (the narrators of novels) across space and time.

Something similar could happen to people's received perception of subjectivity as the type of content being produced and consumed changes.

Of course there is the countervailing force of the ecstatic merging of subjectivities through the endless imitation and repetition encouraged by TikTok, SnapChat etc., as well as the crushing force of peer pressure imposed by Facebook and Instagram.

And then there is the lonely blogger, like the Japanese soldier hiding out on a desert island in the middle of the Pacific, still fighting the second World War.