-- Frank Smith

-- Laurie Anderson

What is the relation between narratives and individuals? It is essentially through narratives that individuals become more than the conditions of their existence. Individuals who utilize the inherent reflexivity of the narrative form to question the stories they have been socialized into, to consider alternative versions of these stories, to refigure their lives in accordance with their chosen versions of the stories of which they are a part, who thereby take responsibility for their lives, are the creative agents of culture, society, and history. Such people are the 'authentic' authors of their own becoming.

The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender itself completely and explain itself to it without losing any time.

A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.

What does it mean to want to replace information with stories? ...I would suggest that we need to present [information literacy] and research as paths of discovery that must be generated. Look at the reference interview, during which librarians act as guides. Although there are situations when we simply want to give patrons "information", typically we engage the patron with questions: "What are you trying to find? What is your purpose? How have you gone about searching so far? Or, in storytelling terms, "Where have you come from? And where are you going?

Stories are inherently complex and unresolvable, which more closely mirrors the uncertain nature of contemporary society than a static conception of information. Stories also require a community...

If we want to emphasize the ability of [information literacy] to create an active citizenry, then the more that we can teach it within the context of a community, the better.

At its best, information literacy can help guide students to a critical engagement with research, writing, and the life of the mind, as well as the active citizenship that ought to result from such engagement. At its worst, information literacy is merely a set of skills to enable individuals to "manage information" more efficiently.

The sequencing of a successful search is a narrative.... A conversational interplay between source material, search commands, and project specifics shows the incremental steps evident when searches unfold as stories. One storytelling aid that holds as true for instruction as it does for literature is to ground abstractions in tangible and commonly invoked metaphors such as icebergs (concept-based searches) or needles in haystacks (fact-based queries).

I believe we humans are hardwired to absorb narratives, because through narrative we learn about causal relationships; we learn how things work in the world. This has adaptive value. But it can also cause problems. We absorb narratives so readily, it's difficult to counteract a false narrative, a story that shows a false causal relationship. For example, if I tell a story about how eating organic blueberries caused me to grow to 6'3", that idea is going to stick in your head. It will be hard for you to erase the relationship in your mind between organic blueberries and growth. That's why, I believe, so many cultures developed strict rules about telling falsehoods--or bearing false witness, if you will. Once told, these falsehoods cannot be completely erased; at the very least they leave a residue that clogs our thinking.

I want to make a case for thinking of narratives not as a path, but as three-dimensional spaces, or landscapes through which we can take paths....

We recognise great work, to some extent, by the density of details found in the "narrative landscape". "Bad fiction" is perhaps a pAth through a poorly-realised landscape; successful bad fiction perhaps traverses a very good landscape that exists in the reader's mind already, requiring the merest of cues from the writer to bring it into play: an Enid Blyton does not create a landscape in the painstaking way a Tolstoy or a Dickens does; she "cheats", by invoking one that she and her readers share already; it is not to be found in the text; it is a sort of conspiracy between author and reader.

The way we talk about narrative is riddled with spatial metaphor.

What if the whole narrative business (or even some of it) really is built upon deep mental mechanisms for finding our way around...?

This esoteric stuff known as epistemology and social network theory... can help us figure out the physical space, the social space and the informational space. These spaces need to have something wonderful about them, so that the idea [of storytelling] doesn't appear just once, but becomes something that's lived: it affects the way I see the world.

Stories talk to the gut, while information talks to the mind.

One of the most telling techniques taught by Neustadt and May (authors of "Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers") is what they call "the Goldberg rule." The name comes from the head of a chain of grocery stores, Avram Goldberg, who told the authors, "When a manager comes to me, I don't ask him, 'What's the problem?' I say, 'Tell me the story.' That way I find out what the problem really is." Behind every issue is a story, the authors insist, and that story should begin with the earliest date that seems at all significant.

-- from "The Clock of the Long Now" by Stewart Brand