How can digital storytelling give us insight to meaning of life values? [Week 10/Digital Storytelling & the Meaning of Life]
A presentation I gave to the class about using digital storytelling as meaning of life philosophy
This week I presented how (and why) I think we might be able to use digital storytelling as a philosophical way to understand contemporary meaning of life ideas. For posterity’s sake or something, I thought something different (and maybe interesting) for my blog post this week would be to post the first draft of presentation notes I made without editing them. For context, my process for presentation notes tends to be a three-step process where the first step is idea-word vomit where I just write whichever ideas pop into my head around the presentation, the second step is more oriented word vomit where I start to tie the ideas together and give them a more academic voice, and the third step is where I make the cleanest version where there’s clearer transitions between ideas and language that supports the academic context in which I’m presenting. These notes are from the end of the first step, as I was just starting to transition into the second step of that process:
So a few kind of contextualizing things for this presentation
This is about digital storytelling. As we’ve returned to in nearly every class thus far, the separation of ‘digital’ forms of humanities from more historical or ‘traditional’ forms of humanities turns out to be a significantly false dichotomy. For that reason, storytelling will be featured in this presentation and discussions of ‘typical’ storytelling through the digital sphere will also be present.
As this presentation is concerned with the meaning of life, some of my presentation will be addressing why finding meaning of life is so urgent an issue for philosophers and the average person alike. Please take this as a trigger warning for references to suicide. While it is in the context of finding reasons to continue to live and there will be no detailed references or descriptions, suicide is something that will come up.
Why do I care about this?
Academically: the idea of academic ‘canons’ frustrates me and I think that while the digital realm does not escape many of the issues of accessibility as we’ve discussed throughout this course, I do think that the creativity of storytelling and the (compared to typical academia) accessibility of the digital makes digital storytelling an especially worthwhile place to find a broadening of what we call academic sources.
Personally: I’m someone who very tangibly has found different meaning of life values through my engagement with digital stories and many of the friends I have can also point to a digital story as providing some element of their outlook on what it means to live well. I’ve spent most of my life struggling with depression and suicidality and it is through digital storytelling - both encountered and created - that I have found ideas about what it means to live a meaningful life.
So, what is the meaning of life?
I’m starting off bold, I’ll tell you exactly what the meaning of life is right now. I’m joking, but I will preface by being transparent to the sort of framework I’m coming at this from.
(or, as me and my friends like to refer to it, Brainheartism)
These are things that I take to be guiding points in my own life, but this is not an endorsement. These have helped me, but I don’t think the meaning of life is any sort of one size fits all equation
(near end, minor point to bring up how digital storytelling isn’t just a power for “good” and empowering meaning of life ideas. Digital storytelling has just as much potential to enforce the idea that we are powerless, we will never find true happiness, etc.)
What is DH (in the context of presentation)?
If humanities tends to be defined as a collection of academic fields concerned with what it means to be human on largely social/cultural/political bases, primarily as it relates to the sharing of ideas, then I can think of very little that is as pertinent to the humanities as storytelling is.
I mean, if you’ve taken any history course the truth of that is evident. But it’s clear in every facet of the humanities. Storytelling and stories are something extremely human. And storytelling is one of the main ways that humans at large share experiences, feelings, and ideas with one another.
In ‘on the origin of stories’ Brian Boyd writes that “We come preequippped to attend to, relate to, take our lead from, and understand other humans.” (132) and that “Trying to understand why others do what they do matters [...] in both human life and literature.” (141) both in the context of explaining why we as humans find so much worth in the venture of storytelling.
So, if I’m defining digital humanities, or even just trying to focus on one aspect of it, I’m led to stories and their storytellers. Like the conversations we’ve had as a group about the notions of digital humanities vs. just humanities, storytelling has gained its own digital counterpart, similar to digital humanities, i remain uncertain whether the term digital storytelling actually conveys anything that simply storytelling does, but for the sake of this presentation and the context of this course, I’ll be using it.
How is DH relevant to philosophy?
In general, storytelling (whether fictional or not) has great persuasive power over the construction of our ethical values, we see that in the construction of children’s books and entertainment with ‘morals’, in the continued legacies of ideals that get passed on through the anecdotes that parents tell their kids, and that governments tell their people. Some of the most basic and foundational works that philosophy turns to even now come from the dramatic retellings contained in Greek storytelling. Socrates is held as the founder of Western philosophy, is one of the first people we consider a moral philosopher, and everything we know about him we know through stories about him, dialogues echoing him.
To be clear, I don’t think this is at all problematic. As much as philosophy wishes to be about achieving an absolute truth, I personally hold it to be more about striving towards it despite an acceptance that there isn’t actually any single truth that can be meaningfully reached. It is perfectly acceptable to me - and, apparently most of the history of academic philosophy - to see the story of Socrates and find it meaningful, to derive value and construct ideas about the meaning of life held by Socrates and his students as well as ponder how those ideas influence my own ideas about meaning of life. Socrates need not even be an actual person for this to remain sufficient and a worthwhile source, let alone a person being conveyed 100% truthfully.
I doubt many contemporary thinkers would necessarily disagree with this either. But the perhaps hypocritical nature of the oh-so-rational philosophical academia emerges when you try to step out of the canon. Particularly if you try to step out of the canon towards ‘non-philosophers’.
Philosophy is storytelling. Especially when it comes to ethics. To define what is good or bad, all we do is forge and pass on stories of what we think it means to do good or do bad. To that end, we make stories about what it means to live well. Not solely in the sense of literature or theatre or the arts or fictional works, even in casual storytelling.
But for the sake of this, we’ll focus on the way that meaning of life values can be created with, conveyed through, and crafted by digital storytelling.