There are televisions in restaurants, at the airport, in school, in the smallest place. And even if they’re aren’t, strangers who once talked to one another in bus stations are now swiping or watching or listening. To me that’s not a moral judgment to say we should be cautious.
I don’t fear that we will stop telling stories. We’re finding ways to tell them now, through film, through blogs, through books and poems and music. What I feel is that we’re reaching a place where it becomes difficult to listen to someone else’s story, to stop, to be still. You see it requires stillness and attention. And it makes, you have to quiet your own mind to not want also to interrupt and become self-referential.
The art of conversation, which is one of the things that is in danger, I think, and critical to everything from wooing others, to love, to business dealings, to negotiating conflicts. The art of listening is critical to that. And that means that you have to listen to the other person without thinking the entire time, “This reminds me of this, oh, this happened to me, oh that’s just like,” … and it’s very natural because we spend our days twittering and Facebooking, and I do Facebook. This is part of where we live.
I’m a grandmother, what about these young children who are seeing the world through a lens, who can be in a place where a building is burning down and you see a camera taking a picture of them taking a picture of the disaster.
Or a child’s birthday party that they’re experiencing through the lens. You say well, what’s wrong with that? Well, because when they want the story of what happened that day, they will return to the recording. They will not return to the memory. They will not know how to reconstruct it and recount it using words. They will lose the art of story, I think. And I think that would be a terrible loss in this manner. I mean, the way we tell stories, because stories, we have the studies, it actually connects human beings, neurologically we connect when we tell stories. How cool is that?