5 things I learned… from The Story 2016
Five things under five headline themes. A small snapshot sub-sample of the embarrassment of riches on offer at the Conway Hall last Friday.
Learning itself is but one of several benefits of attendance at The Story. For several sublime hours I turn my head into a hopper and fill my subconscious cargo hold with a rich supply of random access memories.
1. EMPATHY.
“Take time to feel the weight of other people’s agency.”
So said Hannah Nicklin. She talked cogently about the insights to be gained by asking people questions that they are expert in. She also talked about building up carefully to the more difficult and revealing questions; questions like:
“Tell me about a time when you were the best of yourself.”
Musa Okwanga talked with measured passion about journalism in the context of hostile social media.
He is black and positioned himself as “round about B” on the LBGT scale. And yet the most hostile and most vitriolic reaction to his work has been in response to writing about women.
“Fury against women is the lava that runs just under the surface of social media.”
This touched a very raw nerve for this father of four daughters.
2. ADAPTIVITY
“Resist any element of the Luddite that might leak into your world view.”
So said C. Spike Trotman. Her talk was based on a fellow comic maker who had pined for the way things were five years ago. The moral of her story was that change is inevitable and you have no choice but to deal with it. This is perhaps the fact of 21st Century life.
3. ORIGINALITY
“Publishing what the market wants is derivative.”
Canongate owner Jamie Byng talked about how his experience as a DJ had influenced his approach to publishing. The idea of playing what felt right in the moment, being alive to the mood of the crowd, playing or publishing what feels appropriate at a given time and in a given context.
4. HUMILITY
Wolfgang Wild, aka The Retronaut, shared the concept of a “double-edged ego sword.” It is a concept that we’d all be well served to remember. A nice framework for feet on the ground perspective.
One edge of Wolfgang’s sword is the rampant success of his Retronaut brand (The past like you wouldn’t believe). A shorthand for this success is the fact that Mashable renamed its history section to reflect the concept’s popularity.
Seen from another more humble perspective, however, “all I’ve achieved is to change a word on a website.”
Perhaps the most charming, the most beguiling and the most endearingly understated speaker of the day was documentarist/documentarian Daniel Meadows.
Over several decades he has extracted extraordinary stories from ordinary people. His work is a confluence of humility and humour, underpinned by dignity and principle.
“He had cancer in his privates but he wouldn’t have a priest.”
It is fitting that he was followed by visual art duo Thomson & Craighead, who shared some deceptively simple “desktop documentary” projects. They described their art as “throwing a documentary frame around what already exists.”
5. INGENUITY
“When you go into space the last thing that you want is cutting edge.”
Dallas Campbell talked about his investigation of the history of the space suit. He talked about how simple “technology”, such as the rubber bands that held close the pressure bladder inside a cosmonaut’s space suit, is far preferable to untried and untested innovations. In space no one can hear you fail fast.
He also shared some wonderful film of the seamstresses in the Playtex bra and girdle factory who made the space suits for Apollo astronauts.
Gaia Vince discussed the implications of living in the Anthropocene era. She struck a nice balance between urgency and optimism when sharing some ingenious geoengineering hacks. My favourite of these was the Indian railway engineer who is creating artificial glaciers in natural depressions that lie in the shade of mountains in Ladakh. These glaciers melt as the sun gets higher in the sky, at precisely the time that local farmers need irrigation for their crops. As a result, people who had left Ladakh for the slums of Mumbai due to the melting of natural glaciers are gradually returning.
