I am reading Mary Douglas’s excellent little book Thinking in Circles. To my mind she is of the most original and interesting anthropologists of all time. Her books are classics, but on this occasion she has stepped out of her domain of expertise to deal with a particular form of story. She apologies for her lack of expertise, but this is false modesty. She has brought new insight to a neglected field of study, and one that is relevant to the blogosphere: here I am picking up on my earlier Tribal Mind post. If you don't enjoy the analysis that follows go straight to the quote and final two paragraphs.
So what is a ring story? Well it a technique which places the meaning of a story in the middle, not at the end. In effect the series of sentences building to the middle point are matched by the sentences that follow. The form is like this:
A B C D {E} D* C* B* A*
Sentence A at the start has its match in A* at the end and so on. I have scanned and pasted her analysis of the Adam and Eve story which shows how the ring form. The effect is to emphasize the role of the serpent, rather than the expulsion from Eden. She also looks at the story of Abraham and Isaac to show that it is a story of Abraham’s trust that God would provide an alternative, not of his willingness to sacrifice his son. She goes on to the Illiad and Tristram Shandy amongst others. Very readable, insightful and I think useful in an organisational setting.
The from of the ring cycle is difficult to create, although I am working on a workshop method as I think it could be a valuable way of gaining perspective shift over the conventional beginning, middle and end which are are used all the time. Douglas asks why such a high literary form would emerge in relatively simple societies. Something which is not unusual, she references how a man aspiring to leadership among the Somali can only win support if he has mastered a fiendishly difficult poetic form.
Douglas speculates on why such forms have emerged; to quote:
Written words are not supported by body language, voice, and physical context. They lack that foundation. This is where poetry can help: a show of literary authority may be as good as a show of independence or valor. This would be one of the advantages of a high-style literary form in societies with simple technology and weak co-ordination. All communities need to have shared meanings. A set of literary conventions (the more complex the better) is necessary for the itinerant teacher or holy manNow it occurred to me that as the blogosphere grows it will need to generate genres and forms that allow us to see patterns of meaning and authority. I wonder if it has already started to happen? Guides to good blogging practice are being published, but is also possible to discern distinct styles or forms. I also wonder if the discussion thread of one line communication is a partial ring form? It builds to a climax, and then tails off with repetition. Maybe we should start to experiment with distinct types of genre (well beyond tagging this) to set expectations of our readers as to the type of story they are going to hear? That is of course what genre does; we like to know if we are in a comedy or a tragedy …..
After all what is the blogosphere but simple technology and weak co-ordination? Maybe in this new society we are creating we can learn from older forms. Maybe we are the nomads and hunter-gathers of cyberspace. Who are the high priests of the blogosphere? Have they already created their own form of story which signifies their authority? Is the Cluetrain manifesto written on tablets of silicon? Will the walls of Jericho (the corporate firewall) come tumbling down?
Comments (6)
Interest snapshot of what looks like a good read, dave. I've made a note. Care to share the one hottest application this might have for the wave of future in business? I'd like to see a bit more about how it would be applied:-) Any examples?
Posted by Ellen Weber | March 25, 2007 11:05 PM
Posted on March 25, 2007 23:05
At this stage Ellen I can see the potential, but I am not sure of the form. However I think it may be in creating specific forms of communication to ritualise purpose (rather like a style guide). I also think the ring form itself may be useful as a workshop technique to increase diversity of perspective. I have an idea or two of how which I will try out sometime. Any thoughts from anyone on this would be welcome
Posted by Dave Snowden![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/nav-commenters.gif)
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March 26, 2007 5:43 AM
Posted on March 26, 2007 05:43
Guides to good blogging practice are being published, but is also possible to discern distinct styles or forms.
I may well be mistaken, but I think that much of the guidance re: good blogging practice is about driving traaffic and ultimately about some one or other search for monetization of content (so far).
There are interesting examples (in my opinion) of how blogging in some online communities is beginning to create genres and forms of posts, agreed-upon-in-community rules about commenting, ways to scaffold understanding and meaning from what is linked to and what has gone before.
I think at times I am watching early instances of howknowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology" are creating emergent fluid forms around nodes such that knowledge and meaning are being created in the networks of conversations and stories.
Rather than looking too hard for design principles, my intuition suggests to me a re-reading of Steven Johnson's Emergence and the articulation of only a few simple rules combined with a better understanding and acceptance of the notion of strange attractors.
I suspect that these few simple rules have already been seen in the process of blogging as it grew into a more widely accpeted social process, and will need to be retrieved and re-discovered as blogging gets subsumed into the machines that are business, education, media and politics.
Posted by Jon Husband | March 26, 2007 4:15 PM
Posted on March 26, 2007 16:15
As (almost) always in blogland, some synchronicity perhaps .. follow a couple of links and voila !
This new web service (BlogCode.com) is based on StoryCode.com and may become a helpful way to find and interwtingle with interesting and / or useful (to you and then perhaps to others) blogs.
Posted by Jon Husband | March 26, 2007 4:32 PM
Posted on March 26, 2007 16:32
Being someone slightly obsessed by the idea of form, here's some quick thoughts:
I think that the ring form is good for remembering and learning the whole story/epos in cultures of oral tradition. Like rhymes. So even if you do not really remember the meaning, you may remember the rhyme (and then the meaning comes back to memory, or at least you roughly know what to try to remember.). You may not remember what comes next, but you may remember that you went "up" or "down" to the 3rd of fifth ring, so you know approximately what the next topic is about.
I do not think that it's that impressive to the listener, though. I don't remember the source, but I vaguely remember studies about pattern recognition capabilities of visual and auditory input, and if I remember correctly, the eye is much better to detect complex, nested patterns than the ear.
Taken together, this would mean that the ring form would not be that effective if you just want to "deliver" a message, since it's good for the "learner"/"speaker"/"sender" of the story/message.
But I'm sure that you'll be able to turn that into an advantage...
Posted by christianhauck![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/nav-commenters.gif)
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March 27, 2007 5:14 PM
Posted on March 27, 2007 17:14
I corresponded with Mary on ring structures quite a bit over the past few years. During this period I happened to be reading a manga (Japanese comic) by Osamu Tezuka. It was entitled Metropolis and involved an "artificial being" in search of his or her parents. I noticed something odd about the temporal structure of the story and so decided to analyze it a bit. I discovered it had a ring structure.
During this same period I have been interested in Disney's Fantasia. With a little bit of work I satisfied myself that two of its episodes -- "Nutcracker Suite" and "Sorcerer's Apprentice" -- have ring structures. In its original form the movie as a whole may be loosly ring-form -- it all depends on how you want to count it up.
Posted by bill benzon | May 20, 2007 4:01 PM
Posted on May 20, 2007 16:01