The Big Picture: An intro to The Human Storyteller

I sometimes play a game with my friends when we are in a public space. We pick someone, like a waitress or a bartender or the person opposite our table, and start telling their life story. It's quite easy to make up an imaginary tale about a stranger, because it's wired into all of us. We do it all the time, inside our heads. You do it too. You are a storyteller. Not because you write, perform, want to sell something, or make a name for yourself. You are a storyteller because you are human, and stories are how you make sense of the world. You decide, in a breath, what a stranger's face is telling you, what a silence between two people means. You tell yourself that you never get the recognition you deserve, or that you get too much recognition, and a million other things.

Our individual stories melt together to form collective stories, and those collective stories help us organize communities and movements and build amazing things like democracies, economies, and nations. They make us feel connected to everything. Stories can lift us, and they can rip us apart. Our stories can make us balanced beings in flourishing civilizations, or they can make us suffer in a crumbling world.

Storytelling runs on attention

For humans, storytelling is a faculty, not a profession. It's an inherent skill we all have, like the ability to walk and talk. The faculty of storytelling runs on attention. A slow, ancient kind of attention where you stay with something long enough for it to open. The difference between hearing a tapestry of sounds and noticing the individual birds, the lawnmower, and the distant truck. The ability to read a rather lengthy piece of text, like this one.

When you pay attention, the world becomes real, meaning forms, a story takes hold, and we connect. It is a loop that stays open, and the meaning changes with your experiences. The story is a hypothesis about the world, held loosely. If we lose attention, we close the loop, and our stories turn toxic. Dictatorships, genocides, and other atrocities happen when we close the loop on stories, and they become a projection wearing attention's clothes.

The thinning of attention

Our attention is being worn thin by a world built to keep you moving and never let anything settle. I often pick up my smartphone to read a story, but end up in a completely different place, inside an endless scroll of shallowness, created and served by machines rather than humans. You probably know the feeling. The thinning of our attention has been happening for a long time, and but it's been accelerated by the internet and the introduction of addictive design. But there is an underlying current in the world, that has been pushing the internet in that particular direction. The obsession with speed and growth. When attention thins, the faculty of storytelling starves. We end up with closed-loop stories that make us lose our true north and separate us from the world. Our survival as a species hangs on our ability to tell stories.

A new path

But there is hope. The very thing that is central to the thinning of our attention, the internet, also holds the promise of an era of human storytelling that can enlighten us in new ways. The internet itself was not the betrayal; it was what got built on top of it. The web's open promise was real, but the attention economy closed the loop on it.

We can design technology to support attention, and we can collaborate with machines rather than letting them dictate our stories. That was the dream of the internet when I was a young man, and it was somewhat naive and somewhat utopian, but also held real possibilities. We can learn from the early internet and what made it fail, and build a new path that fuels our attention.

My background

I have had a front-row seat to the hollowing of attention and the decline of the human story. I have seen how the internet can work for our benefit, and I want to push it in the right direction, which is why I decided to launch The Human Storyteller, where I will publish a series of essays. This is the opening one, which serves as the compass. The following essays will each carry a single idea as far as it will go. I intend to use it as a stepping stone for a book.

When I started my career shortly into the new millennium, we were a bunch of digital storytelling pioneers who believed we were entering a new age of enlightenment, fueled by the internet. I created one of the world's first online documentaries, which led me to write a book on Internet storytelling, The Digital Storyteller (Den Digitale Fortæller). Then I went to work as an executive editor at Magnum Photos, where I launched an early version of an online magazine. I spent years learning how to craft narratives and watched them nudge worldviews.

Later, when I embarked on a journey as a tech entrepreneur and became a fellow at MIT and Constructive Institute, I noticed how our attention and the human story got derailed, like a freight train that keeps going straight into the desert long after the tracks have turned in a different direction. I helped build the train, and it's time we put it back on the right track.

It's already real

I have started building differently. My current startup, Duckling, is a new kind of media designed to fuel the attention human stories need. I recently founded Nordic Media Lab, a collective of tech entrepreneurs building a new social internet based on values like trust and cohesion. I'm not here to sell my projects, but they serve as proof that the cure is real and already underway.

In fact, it's not about me at all. It's about you, because you are the storyteller. So, read one essay. If it lands, stay and send it to one person you think would feel the same way. That is how a new collective story begins.