The Information Narrative

The Narrative is the framework on which news stories are hung. It is an attempt to provide the context in which the story occurs.

However, since an unfolding story may have new facts or elements emerge over time, The Narrative (which implies an ability to explain over time) can, in practice, become a procrustean bed in which reality is hacked or stretched to fit the original, necessarily limited context.

Elements which confuse, oppose or can't be explained by The Narrative pass away, less noticed than elements that fit neatly. So often, the original formulation of The Narrative determines how perceived reality unfolds.

And this is as true of one's own fettered biases as with the complicated construction of the news flow.

Human's have an instinct, a need to organize their perceptions into experience. And the original context in which these perceptions are formed into experience self-reinforces every new perception which in their turn further reinforce experience. Those that don't fit The Narrative are easily rejected, virtually unnoticed. They simply lie outside the world-view of the aggregator.

This why some people react harshly when presented with difficult to assimilate information. They rightly feel it is at odds with their entire understanding of their experience, experience which functionally constitutes their construct of reality. With some folks, to challenge a single idea is to threaten their entire edifice of sanity.

Yet this is precisely how civilization proceeds. Incontrovertible ideas that benefit enough of the whole will take hold and old, outworn ideologies will pass away as useless anachronisms, no matter how fiercely defended.

Ultimately, that which is not useful will not be used. It will lose value and not be preserved.

Let us hope that current hatreds by time will be made uncouth.