26/06/2018
By popular demand, here is the speech that Stephanie Feiereisen and Tom van Laer gave to open yesterday's Story Consumption Symposium ( ):
"Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Story Consumption Symposium.
Did you see the Vogue, Guinness, Game of Thrones, and TripAdvisor banners coming in? They are not only great for selfies but also represent today’s four sessions of luxury, popular, professionally acted, and digital story consumption. They also anchor the most recent history of story consumption. Let us tell you a story and you will see why.
Sixty-five thousand years ago, we had crawled well out of the oceans and started painting caves near Bilbao, Spain. Since that time, we have formed small and large communities in various parts of the world. Humans developed by telling stories.
The ancient Greeks, for example, told stories at an event they called the symposium. At a symposium, slaves would poor perfectly good wine on the floor in a libation, a ceremony to honour the gods. Then, they would get everyone drunk, and finally a free Greek with the function of symposiarch would name a subject and tell each guest in turn that they must tell a story about that subject. One of the slaves would have been Aesop, who wrote down many of the stories he heard which led to the famous Aesop’s fables that inspired the name and theme for our evening venue, fairy-tale bar and restaurant The Fable. As you can tell, we have not changed much since antiquity except that the wine today will follow the storytelling instead of vice versa.
After, antiquity, ever more communities formed with different ideologies. Civilisation advanced and leaders learnt the possibility of controlling people by telling stories. Kings and queens even had plays written to help them deliver their messages. For example, King James I commissioned William Shakespeare to write Macbeth.
Moreover, when Gutenberg invented the printing press, stories could be told en masse. Mass communication meant one story could be told to a mass population. First for beer, such as Guinness, and later for other products, big brands were built. Controlling messages and telling top-down stories became big business. TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines enabled this messaging to be controlled. In the luxury industry for example, Vogue meant millions of people would consume the same fashion stories at the same time. It also became easier for capitalist and communist governments to tell their story to a mass population, top-down.
Yet then, everything changed. The world became different: lots of stories everywhere that big business or politicians did not control. For example, many people are consuming Game of Thrones who simultaneously tell their own stories, learning from each other. As another case in point, TripAdvisor is just like in the caves near Bilbao, but much more connected: consuming stories from the ground up, not the top down. The way we consume stories has changed; have you changed the way you research and tell them?"
