Averting our Attention with Storytelling...

I have to admit that reading that article about Mathew Shepard was a real eye opener. My initial reaction to reading about his story was more positive than it should have been; I felt like it was a good story of justice being served. Justice was indeed served to Shepard’s murderers but as the authors of this article, Aoki, and Ott, point out, the media used Shepard’s case as a story of two “monsters” preying on an “innocent victim.” This angle on the story helps us sympathize with Shepard but it averts our attention from larger social implications of the murder. Instead of facing the fact that much of our society is still intolerant of homosexuals the news media helped the public view the crime as a despicable act by low intelligent hicks, the news media played this up to be a tragic event that society is not held responsible for. The reason for this comes from humanity’s need to cope with the world around them through storytelling.

Human beings are storytellers by nature; ancient humans used the constellations to tell stories, humans pass down stories of myths and urban legends for centuries, a group of friends might reminisce on old “stories” that happened in their younger days, and one of the most popular forms of entertainment for people for the past one hundred years is going to the movies to see a story onscreen. It only makes sense that our news be delivered to us in form of a narrative because that’s what we’re most comfortable with. Maybe we need to evolve as a species beyond the need for narratives to make sense of our world so we can focus on making the world a better place to live for everyone.