How We Use Stories and Why That Matters

Hartley, John

doi:10.5040/9781501351662

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 67 publications

(107 reference statements)

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“…9 Comparative lethality is not often mentioned in storytelling circles, although some scholars have seen it as a crucial force in cultural evolution (Bowles and Gintis, 2011;Gintis, et al, 2015;Bingham and Souza, 2009). What's new is that it has now extended from military hardware into 'soft-power' storytelling; that is to say, strategic stories about how 'our' big sticks are a match for 'theirs' (Hartley, 2020). Although Australia has been preoccupied with submarines, the main instrument of 'supplication' available to any contemporary power is the aircraft carrier.…”

Section: Comparative Lethalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is also the system of systems that governs the interactions of groups, which are conducted by means of 'staged conflict' across low-trust border zones, by means of which new ideas may be imported or exported from any one group or among many. Interaction with external groups by means of cross-border translation is fundamental to the semiosphere, being the process that exposes cultural groups to risk and ensures their resilience and adaptive capabilities, all at once (Hartley and Potts, 2014;Hartley, 2020;Hartley, Ibrus and Ojamaa, 2021).…”

Section: War As Evolutionary Progressmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As 'platform capitalism' proliferates globallywhere it's aircraft carriers, all the way downthe formation of classes and class consciousness is organised now around the means of mediation. Digital media literacy is not a psychological aptitude or an individual skill: it is a group responsibility (Hartley, 2020). If alternative 'strategic stories' are to be imagined and collective action organised, then popular culture becomes a 'platform' for the coordination of new kinds of 'worldmaking'.…”

Section: Worldmakingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Strategic stories: weaponized or worldmaking?

Hartley

2023

Global Media and China

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The deployment of strategic stories, that is, stories designed to prevail over adversaries, is at work in domestic politics as well as in diplomacy. In both cases, the strategy has two aims: to create a division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and at the same time to ascribe moral supremacy to ‘our side’ while posing ‘their side’ as an existential threat. Strategic storytelling specialises in discrimination and foe creation, but the nature of the actors involved has changed in the digital era. Now, ‘we’ and ‘they’ are organised into decentralised and mediated classes based on common identities, enabling collective action at planetary scale (e.g. climate activism, gender and ethnic justice, far-right extremism). At the same time, media platforms and news organisations are part of the apparatus by which strategic narratives are weaponised for warfare. Thus, I argue, digital media analysis needs to understand the ‘strategic turn’ in storytelling, and its deployment by states and ‘non-state actors’ alike, in this case, news media. Alternative models of worldmaking, in which popular culture acts as a pedagogic platform for class formation and activism, enter an ecology in which narrative is already a weapon of war – where it’s aircraft carriers, all the way down.

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Section: Comparative Lethalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: War As Evolutionary Progressmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Worldmakingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Strategic stories: weaponized or worldmaking?

Hartley

2023

Global Media and China

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“…To summarise, we propose that a more integrated approach to cultural analysis, that transcends the artificial segregation of the so-called two worlds, is a way forward. Theoretically, this approach is rooted in the so-far unexploited resonance of cultural semiotics (Tamm 2019, Tamm andTorop 2022) and cultural complexity science (Mitchell 2009, Schich et al 2014, De Domenico 2019, and can build on the "cultural science" approach (Hartley and Potts 2014, Hartley 2020, Hartley, Ibrus, and Ojamaa 2021a. Empirically, the approach could be supported by a growing corpus of research which harnesses the common roots of research in cultural history, networks, higher-order topology, and computation (Schich 2019).…”

Section: The Tallinn Approach Of Cultural Data Analyticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Science Meets Cultural Data Analytics

Ibrus

Schich

Tamm

2021

Cultural Science Journal

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For developing Cultural Science as a research field and practice it is worthwhile reconsidering the ways to approach the study of large corpora of digital content and data. In this context, Digital Humanities (DH) has been a success story in the academic world. However, we argue that it is better to consider DH as a transitory phenomenon that needs to be developed into more specific research fields, while at the same time it could benefit from being extended towards an even more multidisciplinary science. To achieve this, it is vital to first transcend the artificial division of cultural inquiry into the qualitative analysis of idiographic phenomena and the quantification of nomothetic phenomena. It is furthermore important to surpass the dichotomy of specific versus general as research objects; for example replacing this with the notion of the semiosphere as a research object, defined as the ‘smallest’ functioning element of culture by Juri Lotman. In this perspective, the singular cultural unit is always conditioned by the whole of the semiosphere, while the whole can be always changed by the singular, both in line with classic hermeneutic inquiry and recent notions of complexity science. Further, the label of ‘humanities’ in DH is at the same time both too large and too restrictive. We instead argue for a study of meaning-making practices in human society, but without confining ourselves to traditional humanities scholarship, but rather, learning from new developments in systems biology, evolutionary economics, complexity science and many more. We think that this new transdisciplinary field of study can help define the scope of the Cultural Science Journal. Indeed, it has already found practical application in a variety of ‘post-DH’ collaborations in ‘Cultural Data Analytics’, often with the aim to explore the dynamics of meaning-making practices by computational means and by looking at a spectrum of materials (textual, sonic, visual, multimodal, etc.) both regarding the longue durée and in real-time applications, if not anticipating the future.

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“…It is a product of complex societies, not of individual knowing subjects. Productive knowledge is literate, expressed most completely in the era of print-literacy, where science, the novel and journalism (the textual systems of modernity) were able to expand the 'frontiers' of knowledge to the furthest reaches of the cosmos, human imagination and public affairs, at planetary macro-scale (Hartley, 2018(Hartley, , 2020.…”

Section: Expansion Of Literacy -To 'Open Literacy'?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Open Literacy: Helen of Troy, Richard Hoggart, Phonic Wars, Greta Thunberg

Hartley

2019

Cultural Science Journal

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Social media and videogames are often blamed for individual behavioural delinquency, but rarely praised for cultural creativity, social innovation, or helping us to form new social groups or work through new ideas. Videogames are now a political football, both in the US (where they're blamed for gun crime) and in China (where they're blamed for childhood myopia). Every new media form has grown up surrounded by those wanting to control it. Popular literacy has never been free and open. Popular novels and the press; cinema and TV; and more recently digital and social media, have all attracted the wrath of incumbent commercial, government or social interests. But in the era of open access, open science, open knowledge, what about open literacy? Can it be extended to whole populations, across demographic borders, at global scale, for purposeless but nevertheless pedagogic play, and for social innovation? Or will it, like predecessor forms, be dismissed as a delinquent waste of time or commodified instrument for profit, power and mass persuasion?

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How We Use Stories and Why That Matters

Cited by 12 publications

References 67 publications

Strategic stories: weaponized or worldmaking?

Strategic stories: weaponized or worldmaking?

Cultural Science Meets Cultural Data Analytics

Open Literacy: Helen of Troy, Richard Hoggart, Phonic Wars, Greta Thunberg

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