The Tech behind Storytelling - Prologue
TBSA series that looks at how advances, both in hardware and software, have made storytelling more interesting and immersive, through the eyes of a passionate storyteller who also happens to be an engineer.
The need to communicate, to tell stories, pre-dates the oldest technologies. Rock art, existed long before the first languages. An argument could easily be made that languages are a “by-product” of this need to tell stories. A more fascinating aspect though, is how tech ties into all this.
From hearing, to reading and seeing, to creating our own story as it unfolds, the Art of Storytelling has come a long way. A lot of it is made possible due to some amazing tech behind the scenes. These technical marvels were initially mostly mechanical in nature but soon more digital.
A bit of history
Now, I am not a historian but, tracing this evolution - of storytelling and tech - is quite straightforward, atleast in the beginning. Before the first recognized languages, we had rock art. Essentially cave paintings that told some story - significant events at the time or myths. Soon, the first glimpses of language was created in a pictorial form - hieroglyphs.
In a hieroglyph, each symbol - a picture, if you will - had a specific meaning. A series of them conveyed an idea, a story. Slowly, the first languages were created and the people started writing on more than just rocks. Here then, is the first milestone. Not really “tech” in the present terms, but machines were invented to create a very important artifact for storytelling - Paper.
These were not technically machines yet. It was more of a process. Principles of Physics and Chemistry were combined together to form the first variations of Paper. It involved choosing just the right fibres from nature, converting the fibre into pulp, playing around with the composition of the pulp to get the right texture and colour and finally drying it out to get paper.
But then Paper mills were setup to produce paper at a larger scale. It was here that the role of machines became important. One of the earliest automation scenarios. It’s funny and interesting, to see how - to this day - we keep finding processes to automate. But what has any of this got to do with storytelling?
Paper revolutionised storytelling. Here was a medium, that was easily available, lasted for a longer period of time and was easy to write on - thanks to the inventions of the Pen and ink. The genius behind storytelling still lies - and will forever lie - with the mind but paper provided a place to plot it out and share. Writing down these stories, enabled them to travel around the world and introduced people to stories and cultures from everywhere. You see, Paper was so important that it is still one of the most important mediums through which stories are told.
But this was not the only way stories spread around. Not everyone was able to read. Even before the Paper, this lead to people telling stories in small gatherings. Stories of travels, myths and legends were shared from person to person. This process soon became formalized in the form of theatre. A group of people came together, and instead of just narrating the story, enacted it in front of an audience.
Writing and sharing stories, now gave these groups new material to work on. And stories propagated the world. But writing down multiple copies of the same story soon became tedious. And then sometime in the 1400s, another important technical milestone simplified it - The Printing Press.
This Series
I will pause the history lesson here, for now. While storytelling was not the only reason that paper or the printing press was invented, it was one of the primary accelerants and major beneficiary of both creations. Roughly speaking we can almost be certain that the number of fiction books - stories - greatly outnumber the non fiction books out there.
For those interested in some interesting charts on books over the years check out OurWorldInData books section
And this is going to become a recurring trope. Sometimes the problem comes in the technical side, sometimes the storytelling side. But both co-evolved together for the better.
Most of storytelling history can be summarised as above. It was either told, performed or written down in books. But the time from the Printing Revolution, to the Industrial Revolution and finally the Digital Revolution changed the storytelling landscape dramatically. It opened up new avenues to tell stories - many of which were unimaginable a while back. All that happened in the last 200 years and there were / are some cool tech behind it all.
I hope that the journey through this evolution will be exciting, interesting and hopefully informative. It will only be fitting to start this journey with one of the most important invention post the printing press. An invention that brought to life an important medium of storytelling - one that people thought was magic and downright impossible a few years prior - and also together, led to the creation of some crazy and revolutionary tech in the later years - The Cinema and the Camera.
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