Creating the new myths
I just finished reading The Cultural Creatives (a very worthwhile book), and one of the themes it reminded me of was the lack of a story of how to live in our culture. We don’t have a shared myth, or, maybe more accurately, our shared myths haven’t been updated since we lived in small tribes. And people are getting hurt because we don’t have these stories to help guide our behavior, to help us navigate life. We need a pattern language for living.
But how do we intentionally write a new myth? A new story for people to live by? As a computer scientist, I see myths as abstractions of true stories. In order to design a new abstraction, you first have to look at a large sample of its concrete examples. My idea for myth-writing is to make it a collaborative process based on a wiki, but with a twist. People who log in will have access to a personal area whose content they control completely. Here, they can provide examples — stories from their own life — without worrying that anyone will change them. Then we will have a public area into which the community can distill and abstract individual stories into common myths intended to resonate with the entire culture. Anyone will then be free to take these stories and retell them outside of the myth-wiki in the hope that the stories can help someone live their life better
.
So what do you think? The details aren’t here yet, but are there general suggestions that might make this sort of project more likely to succeed? Has someone already done this? Do you have stories that you want to tell?
So, this is where you’re hiding, then? No where to be seen on LJ, but I found you.
I’m glad, too, because I don’t want to lose you when you move.
So yeah - just me, stalking.
Goo!
Comment by Goo — 6/30/2005 @ 3:11 pm UTC
I think it’s a really good idea. Sort of like a modern day set
faery tales.
Comment by Steph — 7/2/2005 @ 7:21 pm UTC
I think the acceleration of the spread of ideas through media like the internet and television have largely homogenized and commercialized the concept of myths that earlier societies relied on to define what they’re culture was. But with the loss of our one over-arching cultural mythos, we’ve begun a process of creating smaller tribes. The sub-culture is the new method of self identification and the figureheads of each subculture are in some sense elevated to the role previously held by mythical hero. Take for example Linus Torvalds, i would bet that most people who ascribe to the notion of hackerdom have read his newspost “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.” and that has become part of the collective mythology of Linux. There is a line between celebrity and mythology, but i think with the increased ability to do fact-checking of the internet, it’s harder to propogate a myth because a central part of a myth is that though it’s not real it’s not really fiction either. You can tell the story of beowolf around a campfire several hundred years ago and half believe that it really happened, but now we’ve so sterelized the concept of storytelling that everything is either fiction or non-fiction, never the exaggerated non-fiction that makes for the best myths.
I am greatly intrigued by the creation of a myth by a blended truth of collective experience, i think we need some large problem that is sufficiently compelling in order to get it up to myth status. Sure we all know the sting of a close deadline and the jittery, barely-compiling code written in an all-nighter, but a school project or an over-bearing boss is still not compelling enough to build a myth around. For the open source tribe, the kernel can form the kernel of a myth (i apologize for that)
“Linus Torvalds, a charismatic young hacker, forced to choose between expensive hardware and expensive software boldly works 78 straight hours, consuming 3 gallons of coffee and a case of Bawls, and emerges with not only a kernel, but the entire GNU toolchain compiled and running on a 386, thus began the great microcomputer wars. First IBM was vanquished, but they rose again on the side of good to combat the new great evil. For the evil that Linus was fighting was not to be found in the hardware giant but in the software. For hardware is real, but software is ideas and ideas should be free.” As i type this i really see the subconscious need for this type of adventure expressing itself in rabid anti-microsoft behavior by many in the open source tribe.
Anyway if i go on any further, i’d have to actually turn this into a blog post, and this is on company time.
Comment by Dave McLain — 7/5/2005 @ 5:09 pm UTC