… with a starting point
I ask myself: What would be interesting to know more about? What’s going on out there that I would want to know, but don’t know yet?
And so it all begins.
Social media
Let’s start with social media. I would like to know more about the social media landscape globally. I would like to get to the bottom of this phenomenon.
First, is it a phenomenon, or is it just a name for the way digital medias are organised today, i.e. user-centric? How does the social media landscape look globally? What does it mean for our lives? And what does it truly mean in terms of the way we communicate with each other? What kind of implications does it have for companies? And where are we heading?
Based on that, it would be far easier to grasp the current state of the social media phenomenon. And to come to terms with the future developments.
That being said, the digital landscapes are characterized by their ever-changing nature. New ideas and developments happen at such a high speed that we all need to filter them in order to make some sort of sense of it.
And that’s a theme by itself: Transformation. The speed of life has increased dramatically during the past decade.
Storytelling
Eternal acceleration is of course not a universal truth. Take the area of storytelling, for example. Here, the good old discipline of telling a story that’s engaging, beautiful, erotic, humorous, exciting, scary, surprising, empathetic etc. is as promising and necessary as ever. Even though the possibilities and premises for telling a story has changed with the availability of new digital medias, techniques, equipment and ways of communicating.
So there’s still plenty to explore within the storyteller’s field.
For example: What is the key to successful online storytelling? What can we hope to achieve by telling a story? Has the anatomy of storytelling changed? Is it changing all the time, or will “the good story” remain forever young?
The answer to some of the latter questions might seem obvious, to some. And to me, I think.
But closure is a thing of the past. Today, we need to re-open all the thoughts and notions we have on a specific topic. It must change. And it does.
Maybe that’s one of the biggest achievements of the digital world. That it has emphasized the fact that nothing is dead.
We inhabit a world full of both opportunity and risk. It’s wide open.
Maybe Heidegger was right after all?