I've added a few more books to the pile in the past few weeks. Though now I am trying to organize what I have and narrow down exactly what information I need to give more life to this thesis.
Last week I spoke at length with one of my professors about my thesis. During the course of the conversation she asked me "Why did you decide to do this thesis?" It took me aback, I've been so focused on just creating a thesis that I sort of forgot why I find storytelling so interesting in the first place. As much as stories have been part of my entire life, the thing that set off this thesis was:
I read Coupland's novel in May and wrote a brief review on my Tumblr (here). Like I say in my review, what I found so fascinating were the scenes in which characters had to make up stories. Coupland did a good job contrasting the "true" stories being told as compared to their efforts to create a story. There is also a communal aspect to the tellings. The characters' stories begin to mix together, become one collective tale.
This, I guess is my "why." I want to know where communal storytelling is going. Is Twitter going to really becoming our best method of telling stories as a community (as in- retweets and thousands of tweets about one news story)? Are Youtube comments a sort of storytelling in and of themselves?
Also, why do we still make up stories? Is there still a purpose to them? I like to think so, though it might not be a quantifiable.
