And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.Ī century ago, Benjamin directs his lament about the commodification of experience at the newspaper - a medium enjoying its commercial heyday, not without timelessly timely criticism - but it applies all the more piercingly to the whole buzzfeedery of today’s online news and entertainment industry:Įvery glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible. One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. It teaches us that the art of storytelling is coming to an end. This distance and this angle of vision are prescribed for us by an experience which we may have almost every day. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant… Viewed from a certain distance, the great, simple outlines which define the storyteller stand out in him, or rather, they become visible in him, just as in a rock a human head or an animal’s body may appear to an observer at the proper distance and angle of vision. The picture Benjamin paints begins in darkness but reaches toward the light.įamiliar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force. The most dazzling such transmutation takes place in an essay titled “The Storyteller,” in which Benjamin uses the work of 19th-century Russian writer Nikolai Leskov as a springboard for a higher-order meditation on the role of storytelling in society, the dangers of its decline, and how it shapes our relationship to truth, both public and private. In the introduction, Arendt envelops Benjamin’s genius in her own to describe him as “an alchemist practicing the obscure art of transmuting the futile elements of the real into the shining, enduring gold of truth.” Walter Benjamin Only the storyteller can transmute information - be it in the form of “objective” fact or “subjective” experience - into wisdom.Ī century before the age of the listicle, German philosopher, cultural theorist, literary critic, and unflinching idealist Walter Benjamin (July 15, 1892–September 26, 1940) explored this dance between information and wisdom with great insight and prescience in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections ( public library) - a compendium of Benjamin’s ideas on language, literature, and life, originally published in 1968 and edited by the brilliant Hannah Arendt. A listicle can never order information into truth, much less imbue it with meaning. Although the list may be the origin of culture, truth and meaning are culture’s end goal. Listicles commandeer these bits into alleged order, furthering our collective delusion of mistaking information for truth and meaning there is a reason, after all, why we call such disjointed bits of information “trivia” - the true material of wisdom is meaning, and the meaningful is the opposite of the trivial. I think often, and with billowing concern, about the role of storytellers in helping us cultivate wisdom in the age of information - a task increasingly challenging and increasingly important as we find ourselves bombarded with bits of disjoined information, devoid of the sensemaking context that only deft storytelling can impart.
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