Why Stories

I wrote this around the New Year for Gizmodo, but for some reason (it’s super fruity?) it got lost in the shuffle, so here it is.

Fire was not the first technology. It was the alphabet. By allowing us to tell a story, the transmission of knowledge blossomed, from myth to story to joke. And despite what some may think, that’s what our gadgets do today.

My brain has been trying to close the chapter on this decade, because that’s what it is built to do. Is what we do important? Does helping to create a site like Gizmodo move our culture forward? Or are we simply acting as agents to uncheck consumption?

On the last point, I must concede. We’re probably harming as much as we’re helping, albeit no worse than any catalog or social gathering where one can show off a new toy or talk shop about the next.

But I’ve noticed for a long time a reticence by my peers—by which I mean the average yapping fuckhole on the internet, myself included—to adopt a position of post-innovation hipsterism. To express an attitude of so-over-it before things have barely begun.

Take Twitter. (Please!) Is it a distraction? It can be. Better to acknowledge it as protocol, the latest vector through which we communicate, regardless of what story we choose to actually tell.

It’s the story that matters. And our technology, our internet—or our gadgets by which we interface that internet—are tools for telling stories. Big stories. Little stories. And with the blossoming of sensors and passive collection of our personal data, stories that lie in wait, that won’t even be told until someone else recognizes they are there to tell.

Forgive me some dreaming. What will our gadgets look like in the next decade? It is certain they will be less and less visible. The smartphone lump will get more powerful and more aware of its surroundings, communicating data passively at all points. If I want to know the air quality around you and whether or not you’re still smoking, I’ll just ask your phone.

Augmented reality will work, and while I’m not convinced that mirrorshades will end up being the best solution, the technology to embed graphical overlays onto our glasses and perhaps even our contacts will advance at least to a point where we can try it on for size. If the price is right, every pane of glass or mirror will be double as a display.

The keyboard will probably become a specialized tool, much as we’re seeing the same happen to the mouse today. Cameras will eye us, microphones will listen to us, and together they’ll do their best to guess our meaning.

But more surely than anything, I expect our interface to the internet—through the internet—to our friends, family, and species will continue to flourish. Gadgets will provide increasingly granular elements of data, while engineers will dream up new ways to weave those bits into narratives that let us understand ourselves in new ways; or failing that, at least experience the banality of our fellow man with increased fidelity.

Stories are what matter. Stories are what make us human, what gives our outsized brain a reason to exist, even if our capacity to tell them, listen to them, and understand our existence through them is an accidental byproduct of an efficiency first developed to better hunt, feed, and reproduce.

Which is why, even though it may be lackadaisical or unprofessional to some for a simple gadget blog to stray beyond the bounds of firmware updates and product releases, I believe technology journalism remains one of the vibrant places to explore the human condition.

Any tool user can succumb to the navel-song of shop talk, if only to dream for a moment about the stories they might hear or tell if only their rock had a sharper edge or their pen a carbon-fiber quill. But to ignore the story of our storytelling—the exciting boundary where new technology lets new stories be uncovered and old stories told in a new way—is doing a disservice to everyone.

Because why are we here at all if not to tell our stories; and to braid ours with every new fiber we can invent?