The End of Storytelling? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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By froggo
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Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino, from a 2018 New Yorker Interview wrote:Do you look up to anyone? “I don’t see anyone out there who’s better,” he(Glover) said. “Maybe Elon Musk. But I don’t know yet if he’s a supervillain. Elon is working on ways for storytelling not to be the best way of spreading information.” Musk’s new company, Neuralink, intends to merge human consciousness with computers, allowing us to download others’ thoughts. “It will turn us into a connected macroorganism, but it will make our individual desires seem trivial,” Glover went on. “Sometimes I get mad at him—‘You think people are insignificant!’ But we probably are at the end of the storytelling age. It’s my job to compress the last bits of information for people before it passes.” He sighed.


From Neuralink's Website wrote:Every day we’re building better tools for communicating with the brain. With the right team, the applications for this technology are limitless.

Although Neuralink presents itself as developing the technology primarily in order to reduce illnesses.

What I wonder is, even of Childish Gambino's prediction of the application of this technology is slightly outlandish (after all, how many individuals would readily agree to have their "Ideas" shared with everyone around them even if it were possible?) I had always assumed there would come a point where instead of watching videos, reading books, etc. we simply uploaded them into our brains. I wonder what the experience would be like; if a story, which traditionally requires time to be told, could be reduced to a compressed moment of reception, what would be the implications? Would the entire artform of storytelling alter, or would it remain the same, just the format would alter? I also think that the effects of this would catapult academia into a monolith; if it took no energy to acquire data and information, and it could be gathered instantaneously, would the sheer force of the collective understandng grow as well, or, is it required that one apply time to reflect on stories, and thus the majority of our time would be spent analyzing information as opposed to merely acquiring it?

Going back to Glover's assertion that "we would download the thoughts of others." Would having this ability truly eradicate the urge for storytelling artforms? We can, on a slower scale, download the thoughts simply by reading forums such as this, and yet stories remain a valued entertainment; content provides us with purpose in life.

If we could "download the thoughts of others" how would those thoughts be formed? Could their presumable lack of linearity and the disorganization of information make us rather desire the comprehensive form of a story even more (the role of a storyteller is to gather all the relevant information and present it in a clear manner)? Or do you believe that the new paradigm would allow our minds to adapt and become familiar with the best ways to comprehend this new form of information transference?

Also, if our minds knew that the thoughts in our minds were to be shared, would we intuitively find means of expressing thought itself, in its purest essence, in a willful manner-- would the ability to "edit" our own thoughts for presentation become second-nature?

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