TED Talk ~ Isabel Allende

Q: What is truer than truth? A: The story. ~ A Jewish saying

http://blog.ted.com/2008/01/03/isabel_allende/

We are the Stories that we tell about ourselves. Narrative Therapy

What is Narrative Therapy? By alice Morgan (2000)
Page 1.
Narrative therapy is sometimes known as involving a "re-authoring or "re-storying" converstaions. As there descriptions suggest, stories are central to understanding narrative was of working.

The word story has different associations and understandings for different people. For narrative therapists, stories consist of:

• events
• linked in sequence
• across time
• according to plot

As humans we are interpreting beings. We all have daily experiences of events that we seek to make meaningful. These stories we have about our lives are created through linking certain events together in a particular sequence across a time period, finding a way of explaining or making sense of them. This meaning forms the plot of the story. We give meanings to our experiences constantly as we live our lives. A narrative is like a thread that weaves the events together, forming a story.

page10.
Summary
....Narrative therapists think in terms of stories -- dominant stories and alternative stories; dominant plots and alternative plots; events being linked together over time that have implications for past, present and future actions; stories that are powerfully shaping of lives. Narrative therapists are interested in joining with people to explore the stories they have about their lives and relationships, their effects, their meanings and the context in which they have been formed and authored.

Wikipedia Says

Narrative therapy holds that our identities are shaped by the accounts of our lives found in our stories or narratives. A narrative therapist is interested in helping others fully describe their rich stories and trajectories, modes of living, and possibilities associated with them. At the same time, this therapist is interested in co-investigating a problem's many influences, including on the person himself and on their chief relationships.

Briefly, narrative approaches hold that identity is chiefly shaped by narratives or stories, whether uniquely personal or culturally general. Identity conclusions and performances that are problematic for individuals or groups signify the dominance of a problem-saturated story.

Problem-saturated stories gain their dominance at the expense of preferred, alternative stories that often are located in marginalized discourses. These marginalized knowledges and identity performances are disqualified or invisibilized by discourses that have gained hegemonic prominence through their acceptance as guiding cultural narratives. Examples of these subjugating narratives include capitalism; psychiatry/psychology; patriarchy; heterosexism; and Eurocentricity.

Furthermore, binaries such as healthy/unhealthy; normal/abnormal; and functional/dysfunctional ignore both the complexities of peoples’ lived experiences as well as the personal and cultural meanings that may be ascribed to their experiences in context.

The narrative therapist is a collaborator with the client in the process of developing richer (or "thicker") narratives. In this process, narrative therapists ask questions to generate experientially vivid descriptions of life events that are not currently included in the plot of the problematic story.

From a comments under Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid" article in The Atlantic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/


On Entertainment and Thinking
"Entertainment and thinking are very different, but they don't always appear to be so.  Clicking through Wikipedia pages on quantum physics, while it may appear to be educational, is still entertainment if I'm not invested in the knowledge and making my own connections - I may simply be using it to procrastinate, something to read, and I won't remember any of it tomorrow.  It is not so much the activity as what we put into it that makes it entertainment v. thinking.  Running, watching TV, surfing the Net - they can be either, depending on how we approach them." ~ Michele Ciradae

On the Decline of Reading for Leisure
"People don't seem to have any appreciation for reading except to garner the barest facts" ~ Pembquist

"I wonder if there isn't something analogues in peoples current intolerance for prose that doesn't
deliver." ~ Pembquist


On Spending Time Online
"I find myself disembodied after hours online" ~ Cindi

"The disconnect between present, three dimensional space and the unreal world where my eyes and mind go when I'm online" ~ Kisslogic

Distraction from Ads
"Those of you who feel distracted by the number of ads, safari 5 and browser extensions like "readability" will present you with the text of the article. You can then, if you wish, save it as a PDF file and  if you have a ipad/kindle etc you can read it on there." ~ Zactu

On Bite Sized Info and Interactive Discussion

"I find myself skimming comments in the discussion below this article and I am struck by a different view. While I do skim, bite-size my info, I also interact on a whole different level. I mail authors, I discuss articles - as you said, media changes us too, and in this we are becoming more conversant, part of an ongoing discussion. Just like you don't listen for hours on end to every person, idea or even lecturer without interjecting, asking questions, participating in the discussion - so are we doing now.

We can, and sometimes do, spend hours upon hours immersed, but more often, we partake in a living discussion. While I might spend time reading a "bite-sized" blog articles, I also read the mileslong discussions underneath. So, all in all, I think that while Carr is quite right that we ARE becoming more bitesized, it is because all discussion is shorter than a speech is." ~ Andeas Ronnqvist

I have had another thought as to how you might approach your project. Identity is also formed through the cultural practice of story telling. As a designer you may be interested in how cultural conventions are used in constructing stories or narratives of identity, and, how design subsequently uses visual language to communicate those conventions visually. - Caroline

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” - Carl Sagan

There are several themes that you could explore: Making, Material, Readership, Language. - Caroline

The key words I take from Sagan's quotation are the descriptors flat, flexible, and that the book has the capacity to 'break the shackles of time'. - Caroline

For me the key phrases would be "one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person", "an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you" and "binding together people who never knew each other".

Old Blog, New Content.

Just deleted everything off this blog to start it fresh for my fourth year Graphic Design research project.