HUMANKIND had not really gone anywhere since it told stories around a campfire. The storyteller stood nearest the light, while the rest, all huddled around the fire, tucked themselves in the perimeter toward dark space, frozen in the fable. All the elements in that setup are basically present in modern-day storytelling, say, cinema—light, the story, the rest of us huddled in the dark, mesmerized by the tale.
Storytelling had since taken a multitude of forms as technology evolved—books when Johannes Gutenberg invented the press, movies when the Lumiere brothers cooked up the cinematograph, and yes, the hypermedia when Tim Berners-Lee conceived the web.
So this thing about media transitioning into stranger forms isn’t really new and all the anxiety around it is a given. It has always been in a state of ferment, but if there is one constant that survived the times, it is storytelling itself. It sits deep in the human genome, and the stories that survived were those that were told well.
Still in the arch of the Cebu Press Freedom Week, it might be told that the press is still pretty much in the business of storytelling, one human business that never closes shop despite and because of the idiosyncrasies of the times.
We recall the character Scheherazade of the epic “A Thousand and One Nights.” The hurt and bitter king killed his wife for infidelity and resolved to marry one virgin after another, but only to kill them before they could even get the chance to cheat on him. Scheherazade, despite the scheme, agreed to marry the king. On the night of their marriage, she told the king a tale, but didn’t conclude it. The king spared her life for a day so she could continue her story. But she was wiser, she weaved one story after another for a thousand and one nights, and thus spared herself from the murderous scheme to eternity.
Here was a case of storytelling as a matter of life and death. Scheherazade had the better wisdom that only stories and the telling could keep her alive. She could not dare stop, lest she’d be executed.
The press can very well take it from Scheherazade. It’s the story and the storytelling that will keep it alive, regardless of the medium. If it can take that task to heart, it can keep itself relevant, to keep the rest within the confines of this campfire in the wild we call journalism.