The (really) oldest profession

Before the written word, before caveman art or the first alphabet— all news, history, and wisdom worth “broadcasting” had to be told by the spoken word alone.  The Ancient— and we’re really talking about pre-Ancient— art and craft of story-telling was long ago the first and only “mass media.”  Long before anyone scratched a stick figure on the wall of a cave, humans communicated through who knows how many generations simply by telling stories to their children.

I imagine that by a certain time, just before cave drawing began, a person in the tribe who could remember and retell the tribe’s history in such a way so that listeners would remember and retell it just as vividly themselves, was an extremely important person.  Of necessity, these pre-Ancient storytellers had to be trusted, convincing, and above-all, memorable.  The evolution to cave drawing and the invention of words and an alphabet came untold centuries later, perhaps out of necessity; as tribes survived longer and grew larger, it became impossible to remember everything without “written” notes.

In this sense, caveman art was our first “recording media,” preceding writing on animal skins, parchment, the printing press, magnetic tape, computers, CDs, flash drives and smart-phones.  Yet, the original human media— the telling of a memorable story— was never made obsolete.  As highly successful movie producer, Peter Guber, writes in his book, “Tell to Win,” telling stories like Aesop fables or Biblical miracles motivate people in ways ordinary management dictates do not.  Guber’s book is full of stories about how telling a story is the one fool-proof way to communicate and persuade.

Arguably, Guber’s thesis is rooted in human genetics and evolution since the first two people met on Earth.  That untold numbers of centuries before the first attempt to write or draw were filled only by the spoken word, might explain humans’ innate preference for the well-spoken story.  Guber’s argument is compelling, too, because the “information age” is chock-full of gibberish, words and snippets, so often without meaning, “getting back to the story” makes practical sense.

Recently I met with a top-tier media relations group at a major multibillion dollar company.  The company’s relationship with the public is critical to business operations and public safety, to say nothing of its bottom line.  So after a number of winded exchanges about “best practices,” “reputation management,” and “audience,” I finally asked—“Ok, so what’s your story?”

The blank stare and the long, unfilled silence were not unexpected.  But after a long pause and a few sputtered thoughts, I realized that public relations and “corporate communications” has become such a rigid profession that it no longer hears what it is saying or how it is being heard.

Admittedly, my bias for the story and story-telling stems from my observations of the movie industry which generates billions of dollars out of thin air, simply by telling stories.  Before the TV rights, the DVD sales, before the box office, before the posters and the hype, before computer-generated special effects, before actors said a word, before the director, before the studio bought, before the producers lifted a finger— there was just the story (in the form of something called a script).  Everything in Hollywood happens because of the story.  The story/script is the tiny seed from which billion-dollar film franchises and other blockbusters bloom.

So if it’s good enough for pre-Ancient cavemen and post-Industrial, information-age media moguls, why is the story so unworthy of effort these days?

The simple reason is that with literally almost a million channels available now—from broadcast TV and radio to cable, to web sites, to blogs and micro-blogs, twitter and text messages— there’s such a scramble for “attention,” something that is too easily confused with “audience.”  In other words, for advertisers, marketers, and others desperate to break through the noise and back-scatter, the meaning of a story counts for less than counting “hits” or “impressions.”

Ironically, it’s this scramble for attention that makes telling a story that much more prescient.  With so many snippets and factoids zooming around, there’s a fresh opportunity for those who can make interpretations, or in today’s political vernacular, give “the narrative.”  It’s not strange to me that political pundits now refer constantly to a campaign’s or a candidate’s “narrative,” when they attempt to interpret the election year horse race.  Listen to the commentators talk about “the narrative for Rick, Newt, Ron, Mitt, Barack…”

If only the candidates themselves would tell their stories rather than let pundits interpret "the narrative."

Politics has long been called the “second-oldest profession” after you-know-what.  But given the span of civilization and its love affair with story-telling and what being the story-teller meant in societies and tribes for centuries before the written word was invented, I simply disagree.