Why is This Happening?
A New Narrative Model Explains It
The Collective Journey model is a response to how pervasive communications have supremely impacted classic linear Hero’s Journey storytelling. This impact has given rise to remarkable — some say unexplainable — developments in consumer behavior, media, politics, and world events. My company Starlight Runner has spent the past several years examining and testing this modality and we have now activated it in our work.
The Collective Journey model helps us explore a new way to look at story, tell stories, and participate in narrative, which has all been made possible by interactive media technologies, and how interconnected we have become.
For centuries, every agency, company, studio, and writer has relied on the Hero’s Journey as a standard for storytelling. But nonlinear, trans-platform communication has entirely disrupted that model. To rising generations, the standard tropes of classic storytelling have begun to feel slow, obvious, and dated. We yearn for a new, far more dynamic and participative approach…
Society is grappling with seismic, accelerated, and seemingly chaotic change:
- How could evergreen brands like Kodak, Sears, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Victoria’s Secret diminish or vanish so quickly?
- How can movements like the Alt-Right, Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and ISIS manifest with such force so suddenly?
- How is it that Game of Thrones or Walking Dead, complex, gore-spattered fantasies, capture the imagination of audiences around the world?
- What caused the United Kingdom to suddenly and unpredictably attempt to exit the European Union?
- How did a man many perceived to be a clownish reality show host become the President of the United States?
The answers lay in discerning the questions beneath these phenomena:
- What does it take for consumers to turn against or abandon a brand en masse?
- What sparks spontaneous self-organized social systems, and propels them to become movements?
- How do global consumer or audience fandoms coalesce around brands such as Spotify or intellectual properties such as Marvel and become advocates for them?
- How can the concerted use of pervasive communication alter the fabric of perception for entire populations?
- How do self-organized, leaderless movements accelerate abstract ideologies into system-altering reality?
The answers to all of these questions and more lay in a new type of story, which in less than 20 years, has taken us from the methodical circle of the Hero’s Journey described by Joseph Campbell…
To the instantaneous and hyper-energized dynamic of the lightning bolt that we are calling Collective Journey.
In the coming weeks, we will be closely examining Collective Journey narrative, both from the standpoint of it being an incredibly powerful new communications model, and in terms of how it explains the remarkable—and sometimes bewildering—changes that have been impacting every aspect of our lives.
Why are we doing this in a public, independent forum? Because our livelihood and even our lives depend on understanding this new model.
When we engage in this kind of velocity, it is imperative that we learn the underpinnings of the stories we are telling and that are being told to us. Our businesses, our government, and our freedoms are on the line.
In short, we are now living in a vast, living communal narrative, and those who understand how to initiate and direct Collective Journey stories will find extraordinary success. Those with ill intent who tinker with the model, however, especially in a time before we fully comprehend it, will be empowered to dangerously alter our perception of reality. In history, when that has happened, the result has been loss of control for vast numbers of people.
More soon, but if you are interested in a detailed account of how we arrived at the Collective Journey model, check out this piece by Simon Staffans:
Next: The Hero’s Journey model has been hardwired into our minds over the course of thousands of years, but now it is starting to fail us.
The Collective Journey Series:
Intro: Why is This Happening?
A New Narrative Model Explains it
Part 1: The Hero’s Journey is No Longer Serving Us
Classic Storytelling Models Are Faltering in the Digital Age
Part 2: When It Comes to Story, You’re Not Getting It
The Drama & Disquiet of Old-Fashioned Storytelling
Part 3: The Collective Journey Story Model Comes to Television
Thrones, Dead, Orange & Others Are Subverting the Hero’s Journey
Part 4: Big Brands and the Awakening of the Docile Consumer
In the Collective Journey the Peoples’ Voice Now Levels the Playing Field
Part 5: Story Can Assert Control Over the Masses
The Power of Propaganda & Multilateral Narratives
Part 6: Regenerative Listening
Collective Journey Narratives Require Genuine Engagement
Part 7: Superpositioning
Each of Us Can Now Be in Five Places at Once
Part 8: Social Self-Organization
Story Can Take What We Imagine and Make It Real
