What's The Story?

IF TOMORROW IS TELEVISED

In most of our lifetimes there has never been an opportunity to think differently as there is now. Words are such infinite vessels of multiple meaning and sometimes it’s opportune to check just what’s in there. This time last year I offered a small workshop on leadership, asking people to consider not leaders, but the word leadership itself. The room shifted uncomfortably at the prospect and I was puzzled at how people working in organisations could be encouraged to think of an ‘other’ when their entire working day was often focused to only deal with the way things ‘are’ now.

At the dawn of 2021, imagining other worlds is possibly a more accessible proposition as we’ve been forced to live in another world, where at best for some they have been curtailed of freedoms and of course for many, they have encountered profound suffering on so many levels.

As part of some research I propose to complete later in the year I’ve been reflecting on, around and with the concepts of storytelling and storytellers. My industry reminds us often that it’s always about the storytelling, so can we look at that more closely, particularly around ‘sustainability’ and what possible meanings this word holds for both commercial enterprises and people.

The observations in this blog cannot be defined as research in themselves as they are not systematic or tested, more the result of a long process of passionate enquiry into what has been a ‘true’ [1]question to me. That is, ‘How can we (as an industry) become more sustainable?’

This question is and has been very problematic — the word comes loaded with confusion, interpretations and implications that can clearly represent multiple meanings, some of which are considered here. So perhaps let’s ask the question, ‘How do we attempt to move towards greater environmental and social equity?’

Situate, situate, situate

In 2005, five years after establishing Mushroom Media, I started to question what to do with my growing business, locked firmly as I was in an unquestioning neoliberal understanding of the purpose of business and growth. A small-business consultant identified in me that growing a business with the singular purpose of creating monetary wealth for myself was not going to happen, as I didn’t appear to care about money enough. In fact, more than that, I was disappointed and even angry to find that an industry that talked a lot about nurturing creativity had developed, due to an alignment of forces, a growing obsession with money, which permeated conversations and ultimately set creative boundaries.  

 In 2003, commercial possibilities had significantly changed for TV producers in the UK, with the retention of rights to intellectual property (IP) allowed for the first time. This had made a handful of people very rich very quickly. This earning potential has now increased year on year, with UK independent producers’ ‘value’ rising steeply, from £850m in 2003 to £3bn today.[2]  Combined with the increasing commodification of ‘content’ — and even of people themselves — the scene was set for the normalisation of capitalist discourses as a measure of success. [3]

 TV-industry storytelling has been historically funded by a hybrid mix of public-service broadcasters held to account by charters and advertiser-funded commercial channels. The capitalist financial structures that drive commercial broadcasting are all about bringing in ratings, which are designed to attract advertising revenue. Put crudely, the advertising industry is driven by a global system that forces listed companies to follow an unsustainable exponential growth graph that was designed to allow mainly white American men in the 1950s to feel more comfortable about studying economics as a ‘science’. [4] Whatever your position on the benefits or otherwise of capitalism on humanity and our planet (a subject way too broad to be dealt with here), the clear evidence is that we find ourselves in 2021 with the gap in social and environmental equity continuing to widen.

I love it when you flex like that

I am an advocate for seeking professional counsel to increase one’s self-awareness, strongly believing it to be crucial for better emotional personal understanding, as well as for the development of professional competencies, particularly in listening and facilitation.[5] I completed a foundation course in psychodynamic psychotherapy around this same time 15 years ago, continuing that process with personal psychoanalysis over a period of four years and, more recently, engaging with professional coaching.

Through these processes I have explored what some of the contributing drivers are to my visceral responses to the dominance of free-market capitalism and its unblinking and enthusiastic messengers. When those situations arise, my frustration is focused on what feels like the waste of human possibility in moving toward greater social and environmental equity at a time where we have enough access to scientific information to suggest it is these goals that should dominate.

 Gathering anecdotal and empirical evidence over the years, I have often seen my attempts to facilitate professional initiatives targeted at improved ‘sustainability’ as failures. If they have been failures, then what exactly might constitute a success? Is it recognition or respect for an inherent ‘goodness’? A commercially successful business that operates in this area? I am laden with my own worldviews and measures of success or failure, right or wrong, winning or losing, dualisms that amount ultimately to the creation of new binaries that close down and limit.

I have found it very helpful more recently to keep in mind that the consequences of our acts are not necessarily knowable, measurable or certain, just as our future never is. [6] What is it, then, to be more ‘sustainable’? To a western audience, the word can smack of policy reports, accountability and expense, whereas to many First Nation cultures worldwide, 40,000 years of cultural knowledge have ensured survival by living in beneficial symbiosis with their worlds. Here, sustainability holds a view of an existence that supports concepts of the relationship between land, language and knowledge systems at one time.[7].

 Response/Ability[8]

 As we start to think about what responses we should have to a world that demands new ideas and stories for survival, we can easily fall into a trap of hauling this dilemma into the language and sales structures we’ve already created. The surety of this language provokes discomfort in me on a subject that is evidently packed with wicked problems.[9] There’s a call to try to create a ‘brand’ for the word ‘sustainability’ from its alleged western associations with sacrifice and worthiness and make it more resonant with ‘excitement’ and ‘creativity’.

 There’s a dangerous emerging emphasis on the importance of now shifting to only telling stories about solutions, then categorising ‘the consumer’ into the typologies that are now being used to help sell these ‘solution stories’ to these consumer categories. This is devoid of exploring new possibilities supporting Einstein’s alleged view that it is impossible to solve problems by using the same thinking that created them.

 I wonder how professional storytellers can start to consider a transdisciplinary approach[11], welcoming the combined knowledge that opposing views bring when developing stories of ‘us’. From ‘collapsology’ or “grief” movements all the way to corporate superheroes, all seen by some as a distraction of the privileged white middle classes. In this time of radical uncertainty, perhaps we must attempt to better consider all views when producing stories for our information, education and entertainment.[12]

 TV executives have suggested that the ‘upsetting’ storytelling associated with programming on the negative impacts of climate change is causing the viewer to experience apathy, if not paralysis.[13]. However, those that participated in the 2020 Citizens Assembly on climate change have reported an ability to think differently on the subject. [14] If TV citizens were offered a more diverse and inclusive form of storytelling on climate change and social equity — on things that matter, because it is important to be clear that these things do matter — could ‘we’ start to think differently?

Tele/vision

The etymology of the word tele/vision breaks down into two concepts: seeing/from a distance. This distance is also in the detachment of those who work in the industry from the viewers for whom they create, with underrepresentation in gender, ethnicity and social class an enduring issue. [15] If we consider the TV producer as ethnographer, then we are often given distanced realist narratives, heavily influenced by commercial considerations. Meanwhile, their own perspectives are infrequently examined. [16] A quick Google search for an antonym for television coughs up “damaged, devoiced, silenced and shallow”. Is this where we now find ourselves and is there is a new space in between to be explored? 

Can TV storytellers collectively strive to develop a capacity to evaluate discourse and culture studies more deeply from an historical, cultural and contemporaneous view when creating new ideas? Considering the ensuing cultural impacts of television and how they shape us in the UK and globally, could more conscious, reflexive practices produce a better understanding of how producers arrive at the stories they tell?[17] This transdisciplinary approach in our thinking is required, [18]alongside storytelling structures that allow for multiple views and encourage ‘two-eyed seeing’[19] on our ‘journey’ — a word that has become so hackneyed thanks to reality television that it needs to be reclaimed and our stories told in a new way.

Like the viewing points created for elites to encounter ‘the sublime’ in the Lake District of the 18th century, have we unreflectingly rebuilt these structures in the shiny corporate headquarters of broadcasters and streamers? Are these now viewpoints for elites to paint the cultural pictures that, in turn, continue to influence our thinking and potential for change?

 The new wave of powerful multinational companies that run streamers such as Netflix and Amazon are now also influencing what stories are told [20] that have an impact on our cognitive ability, socio-political views and thinking[21]. The ongoing threat to public-service broadcasting worldwide and, particularly, under the current UK Conservative government is a harbinger of the health of our very democracy.[22]

 The need to pause and consider who is telling the stories, and how and why they access them feels ever more urgent. The separation of producer and viewer (are these not the same people?) seems to be loaded with the assumption that the viewer is apart and less culturally able. Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, has said that the cultural disconnect between the people who make the programmes and the people who watch them requires urgent action.[23]

 It seems only logical, then, to start with a look at our education systems, to ensure our children are given the skills to hold multiple views from the outset — skills that will equip them for the collaboration that will be so very needed in their futures. The UK’s education and curriculum and the lack of accurate colonial history within it is only just entering into parliamentary enquiry[24]. This feels long overdue and pressure brought to bear through the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020 has clearly expedited the process.

 Scientific syntheses for our understanding of many concepts have not yet properly accounted for new knowledges of microbiology or the evolutions of change.[25] If this is the case, surely the context for storytelling through any media should strive to consistently question itself and its apparent ‘worldviews’. If, as the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti suggests, we are “not thinking our own thoughts but our culture’s thoughts”, then the responsibility to at least understand the eminence of that culture is huge. We must ask much deeper questions of the development of TV stories if it matters what stories make worlds and what worlds make stories.[26]

Hyphae(ves) all round?

Mushroom Media, my company’s name, has held many conceptual trophies for me over time. Initially, the company fruited from the wastes of job redundancy — much like the matsutake mushroom that comes only as a direct result of human devastation.[27] In times of frustration, when it seems I’m failing to make a direct contribution to improving matters worldly, I see Mushroom Media as the vehicle that transports me closer to an understanding that the ‘mycelial’ networks created among and through others are where all of our magic potential lies — through a mission to create new nodes of collaboration for the benefit of the commons. I am also learning that all the work, the thinking, the reading, the writing, the conversations, the heated debates and all the connections to sustainability are the hyphae that are spreading, finding best routes and attempting to access the frontiers of knowledge about which we know so very little but that could hold many conceptual contributions for a more equitable future.[28]

 [1] (Linda Finlay 2003)

[2] (PACT 2020)

[3] (Ursell 2000)

[4] (Raworth 2017)

[5] (Ringer 2002)

[6] (Solnit 2005)

[7] (David Throsby 2016)

[8] (Haraway 2016)

[9] (Grint 2008)

[10] (Richard Little 2017)

[11] (Barad 2007)

[12] (Pablo Servigne 2020)

[13] (Bowler 2020)

[14] (Smith 2020)

[15] (Oakley 2013)

[16] (Schneider 2002)

[17] (M. Bjørn von Rimscha 2011)

[18] (Barad 2007)

[19] (Cheryl Bartlett 2015)

[20] (Jenner 2018)

[21] (Ursell 2000)

[22] (Muižnieks 2017)

[23] (Ofcom 2019)

[24] (Committee 2020)

[25] (Haraway, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene—Staying with the Trouble • Form and Rhetoric in the Discourse of the Anthropocene 204)

[26] (Haraway, Staying With The Trouble - Making Kin in the Cthulecene 2016)

[27] (Tsing 2015)

[28] (Sheldrake 2020)