Interview with Scott Rosenberg

Scott Rosenberg: These fears are perhaps also a function of the specific stage we are at in the emergence of this technology. The stage could last a hundred years. I believe technology and culture will become more in sync. Where we won't be thinking as much about the technology per se and we will be able to focus our time and energy on restoring some of the humanity we fear we have lost.

We are in a stage of novelty with the new media. For example, I have got a piece that we are going to run in Salon probably next week or the week after. A really wonderful short personal essay by a woman whose father died three or four years ago and she only recently had the task of figuring out what to do with the hard drive on her father's computer, which had all this personal stuff on it.

If you have a carton of letters, in most families you pretty much know that you keep them in tact. Or perhaps weed them out if you don't have space and you save a few precious ones. But even the notion of thinking about a hard drive on a computer as a repository of our memory is still hard for people. At some point it will be natural

Letters are not going to be heavily used much more. The personal e-mail archive is going to be where you keep your story.

It is good and it is bad. It is probably easier to find stuff on a computer than digging through a crate in the attic. It is bad because it can be so complete that it defies organization.

Interviewer: Which raises a dilemma about the ubiquity, ease-of-use and afforadability of digital media. At some point you will be able to record weeks of video for a few dollars. Does that mean you never turn the camera off?

Scott Rosenberg: At that point you get into that horrible sort of Spaulding Grayesq problem that if your whole life is being represented in some form, who has the time to watch it. When the MAC is the same scale as reality, you can't use the MAC.

Interviewer: Yes, but the joke is, that is exactly what our brains do. We observe everything. We experience the world through our senses. Then what happens? The cognitive theorists say we learn a very effective skill of forgetting. We forget most of it. We store little pieces that can be grabbed and recontextualized through story.

Scott Rosenberg: While it is true that our brains basically distill the stuff we observe into these story chunks, if you go back even a step before that, there is the theory, dating back to the radical psychology in the sixties of Maslow and Brown that the main purpose of our brains is to radically reduce the input from the world because it is so overwhelming. We close the shutter as much as possible because. I am looking at your face. My eyes are capable of taking in a much wider field of vision. My ears can hear a lot more, but the function of the brain is to sort of zero in on what is relevant.

Technologically this becomes more valuable to understand as experts try to get computers to sort out visual information.

Things that are common sense to us such as my sitting here talking to you in your dining room and a baseball crashes through that window. Now it is happening on the periphery of my vision. It may be just be a small event, but we understand instinctively, that an important thing just happened. On the other hand, if your cat is wandering by as it has been doing for the past ten minutes, that may be just as much physical motion, but it is not important.

There is this kind of role of filtering and reducing data. In essence, this is the problem of the information age. In a crude way this is what everyone is going through with their e-mail boxes. How do I filter out the relevant and discard the irrelevant.

We are putting the concept of story in there as this is the filter. There are two ways to think about it. One is consciously selecting, making stories and to coalesce them in digital form.

And the other is kind of bubbling up, bottom-up mode where it emerges in importantance because it has become a story. Does the OJ story really mean something deep about American culture? Or is it an artifact of the media business that needed to create a dramatic and titilating story out of one of many, many domestic tragedies. This is at the heart of many discussions in media theory.

It relates to the dialogue about Digital Storytelling because if we argue that stories are the important tool that we are going to need to organize overwhelming amounts of information, then which stories are leading us in a valuable direction. This is why my ears perk up a little bit when personal storytelling and corporate branding are mixed. When the goal is to sell something, the motivation for constructing a story is very different than the motivation for personal awareness. We should be careful not to confuse these motivations.

Interviewer: Which suggest another direction for the discussion. Economically, we are blasting apart is the idea of a long term socialized workplace, whether white collar, blue collar or any collar. The 21st century economic player is not the industrial wage slave ripped from the land. It is a person that has a tool set that they change all the time. They exist in a permanent state of self-marketing. The languages that we are trying to develop are humanistic ways to exist in this paradigm. In the same way, arguably, Marx was trying to give us a humanistic way of of responding to the industrial capitalist paradigm.

This new economic player is rootless. We are developing a process to ground that person in an understanding the experiences they have in their life that are highly emotional, highly important to them, that are the value signifiers. The authentic value signifiers for themselves. By being grounded in those stories, we are better able to exist in complex social or economic environments.

If this is applied in a corporate context, fine. In the context of politics or the context of your family fine. The same kind of psychological self-awareness is important in all of those settings.

This is partly about stories we will externalize to the world, about the actual media created. But I am much more concerned about the need to use the story creation process as a lifelong program of psychological maintainance. This is what is going to make you more resilient and humane amongst the chaos of the information age. .

As a cultural critic, I am really interested in the changing role of story in our current culture. In the post-sixties context of identity, many theorists have argued that there has been a collapse of the meta-narrative, religion and then science, socialism and then freudian psychology. It has led to an entire canon of self-examination art in our culture, from recovery movements to solo performance, from identity-based visual arts to the new autobiographical novel. What is significant about that to you?

Scott Rosenberg: In this world where the big stories have kind of lost their power over us, the biggest question is how do you separate out the personal stories that serve people in facing moral and ethical dilemmas and the potential for narcissism, for self-immersion to the exclusion of the broader world.

On the biggest scale, what we see internationally right now is the United States as a solo performer, so to say. Well, gee, we won the cold war. Everyone is now adopting our economic system. So, that's all. It's fine. It is done. We can stare at our navels and talk about sex in the oval office and not worry... Suddenly we wake up here and Russia is collapsing and the economy is not happy about it and, oh, gee maybe this wasn't a great idea.

Interviewer: And we are creating a singular alternative to U.S. global power, the Jihad, an extreme form of nationalism and fundamentalism.

Scott Rosenberg: Maybe the self-immersion of the last seven or eight years is pointless. It is going to be very important to sort out on a personal, social and political level how to and develop and hang on to the stories that really do guide us. We need to avoid being trapped in the We-land, which is always the threat.

In terms of how that connects with technology, I would refer to today's New York Times(August 30). There is a front page story about how first ever university social psychology study of people online, funded by Intel and many technology corporations. They discover, to their shock, that people who spend more time online are more depressed and feel lonely.

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