A Dying Language(Week 3)
I feel vocal word of mouth storytelling is a dying language type.
I don't mean that it's going to eventually become extinct and be impossible to find a skilled expert on like Latin, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, or French. I mean that it is still going to be understandable, but almost entirely nonexistent outside of few small groups dedicated to preserving the skill. Just sitting down next to someone and letting them tell a story seems so rare in this world of entertainment with a myriad of ways to watch, read, or hear a story that don't require physical face to face interactions with the storyteller themselves.
Face to face storytelling, there's nothing quite like it. Sure, a good book or movie can also tell a good story with way more descriptive or visual help than basic word of mouth, but they all lack the same missing something. This something is that close connection and feeling you get while sitting with someone and just letting them prattle on and on with a good story, preferably by a nice roaring fire on a crisp and cool evening under the stars. I genuinely feel this close interaction is an essential and key element to the story process.
Despite the increasingly diverse ways of keeping verbal storytelling alive, they all lack the special feel of being with the storyteller. Audiobooks get the closest in my opinion as they can almost perfectly simulate that desired feeling. This still hinges on whether or not the person narrating has a voice worth listening to. I had this one audiobook and the guy was so deadpan and emotionless that I almost fell asleep to what was supposed to be a thrilling mystery story. Some styles of music come close. Not all songs exist to just make money and be unintelligible noise that gets top of the charts. Some songs solely exist to keep a story alive. Take old ballads for instance, a lot of really old ones are just stories set to music that get passed down from one artist to the next.
Overall I still feel the skill is dying off. I do have hope however, that the attempts at emulating it flourish and get that feeling right eventually.
You are absolutely correct about the death of storytelling. As the plethora of information available on the internet is continuing to increase, the need for direct person-to-person communication has fallen. While this is both good in ways and unfortunate in others, I don't see this changing any time soon.
ReplyDeleteStorytelling is interesting. Nothing tops telling a story with friends and sharing it as word-of-mouth. Ironically, we're guilty of telling our stories online too. But, I feel with the rise in popularity of games like Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder, storytelling will not die. Homebrew storytelling is so much fun and will be a creative way to keep in-person stories going.
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