Part of today’s Lectorial was about story and narrative. Story is important in constructing media texts, as it can frame our experience of the world. It is essential to how we communicate as human beings, helping us to make sense of our lives and the world around us. This point reminded me of an experiment by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel called ‘An experimental study of Apparent Behaviour,’ conducted in 1944.  Subjects were asked to view a short video which featured a bunch of geometrical shapes moving around at varying speeds, and were then asked to interpret what had happened. Most of the subjects assigned personalities to the shapes, creating a narrative out of simple moving geometric forms. I think this relates to Brian’s point that human beings have a convulsion to make narrative sense of our lives, and how our brains are hard wired towards narrative and story.

Story telling conventions can help us to structure our own stories. Generally, all stories have a protagonist, who drives the action in the narrative, and is central to the narrative’s turning points, as well as an antagonist, who causes change and in trouble for the protagonist. Other conventions, such as the three act structure, are almost ubiquitous, particularly in Hollywood cinema. However, narrative conventions are not limited only to the cinematic medium.

Joseph Campbell’s theory on the monomyth of the ‘Hero with a Thousand faces’ (1949) is also interesting. The TED Talk by Matthew Winkler embedded above is a helpful illustration of this idea. Campbell proposes that most protagonists, or heroes, in narratives throughout history follow the same pattern of events. This mono myth exists in all human cultures, and relates back to the first point that story is essential to us as human beings, as a way of reflecting on our own lives through symbolic stories.