One of the recent podcast interviews in Michael Margolis’s The New Storytellers series featured the wonderful Christina Baldwin, author of one of the seminal books in the current storytelling movement, Storycatcher.
I was particularly fascinated by the part of the conversation about introverted vs. extroverted storytelling. Storytelling on social-media venues like Facebook is an example of extroverted storytelling, Baldwin says, and it’s often incomplete and unsatisfying storytelling. Baldwin uses a status-update example, “Just ate a hamburger,” that leaves the audience hungering (my pun intended) for more, or leaves them asking, “So?” and “What happened next?”
Baldwin says that if people aren’t attached to their interior stories, they get addicted to feedback. Although I would have considered myself attached to my interior story, I also recognize a social-media feedback addiction in myself. I’m always curious about what kinds of comments that my, for example, Facebook status updates, have generated.
People are longing for a deeper conversation, Baldwin says. We need to push technology aside and just talk slowly face-to-face in a social space that creates connection. Her prescription for such a space is the circle conversation, the subject of her newest book, The Circle Way.
It’s a very worthwhile and thought-provoking conversation. Give it a listen.