A philosopher once wrote of that threshold place of the unreality of existence like this,
Then the Nausea seized me, I dropped to a seat, I no longer knew where I was; I saw the colours spin slowly around me, I wanted to vomit. And since that time, the Nausea has not left me, it holds me.
Their crisis was a product of many decaying and deracinating effects of modern culture. Chief among them was the displacement of narrative as our teleological center.
The world seems to have lost its rhythm.
Nothing happens when you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, as interminable, monotonous addition.
Life had meaning and lost it. Culture had depth and sent it out the door. Purpose has been replaced by a schedule of hyper-production, social performance, and pseudo-events all converging around the new center of culture, technique.
Out of this state, our philosopher-narrator made an epiphanic decision:
A book. Naturally, at first it would only be a troublesome, tiring work, it wouldn’t stop me from existing or feeling that I exist. But a time would come when the book would be written, when it would be behind me, and I think that a little of its clarity might fall over my past. Then, perhaps, I could remember my life without repugnance.
Writing and story-telling are technologies with distinctly human capabilities.
In a way unlike any modern device, they grow and flourish our self-understanding. They give us a context from which to see. They stave off the inexorable deracination of culture. They unpack the mess of life and order it in a way that is, if not complete, comprehensible.
...So here's the turn.
Do technologies that "empower" writing and storytelling only do it damage? Is the manipulation of these gifts by the use of these tools an incoherent translation method? Have we sacrificed the most powerful capacities of narrative-creating tools at the altar of our technique?
More personally and practically, does the writing I do here, on a computer, to the internet, dilute the storytelling capacity of the art form?
A full-grown body of evidence from researchers like Patricia Greenfield and journalists like Nicholas Carr confirm that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” This is true for the ways we both consume and create within these mediums. Is the skill we trade away within digital mediums our narrative-creating ability?
I believe so and I'll make the case from two angles: online narratives and online narrative-creating tools.