RSA - Storytelling: How narratives shape our reality, ideas and behaviour

Storytelling: How narratives shape our reality, ideas and behaviour

8th Apr 2010; 13:00

(full recording including audience Q&A)
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This event was translated by Michael Wells.

RSA Thursday

Ever since its emergence, humanity has cultivated the art of telling stories, an art that is everywhere at the heart of the social bond. But since the 1990s, first in the US and then in Europe, this art has been colonized by the domain of public relations and triumphant capitalism, and relabelled with the anodyne name of storytelling.

This has become a weapon in the hands of marketing, management and political gurus, so as to better format the minds of consumers and citizens. Behind the advertising campaigns, but also in the shadows of victorious electoral campaigns from Bush to Sarkozy and Obama hide sophisticated storytelling management or digital storytelling technicians.

Join author and researcher Christian Salmon as he unveils the mechanics of a storytelling machine, far more effective than Orwellian visions of totalitarian society. The subject that it wants to create is a bewitched individual, immersed in a fictive universe that filters perceptions, stimulates feelings and frames behaviour and ideas.

Chair: Steven Poole, author and journalist

Suggested hashtag for Twitter users: #rsastories