In his book The End of Narration (Editorial Herder), the South Korean philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, condemns Western narratives because of two irreducible variables: the chronic fragmentation of messages and the accelerated decline of attention in a society. tainted by the spontaneous nature of social networks. We have murdered the narratives and they have fallen into ruin. Nobody reads more than a paragraph or a tweet. Nobody pays attention. No one concentrates their attention on anything for more than a minute. Today 45 seconds are a feature film. Something immense. Too extensive. Crazy. A nonsense.
We are the society of liquidity as championed by the Polish sociologist, Sigmunt Baumann. The one who can’t hold anything between her fingers. The one in which everything slips away, spreads, is lost. The ephemeral has won the battle over the perennial. The fleeting to the permanent. The breeze to the winter wind. There is nothing. Nothing is left over anymore.
That old, linear narrative, with plot, conflict, climax and outcome has died. Everything must be climax. It must be hypnotized with shots of adrenaline that allow the consumer to be held captive by whatever it is or on whatever it is. It doesn’t matter anymore. We must design an endless slide. With thousands of curves and constant surprising turns. Free fall must never end. It should be a constant loop and when the reader thinks he is about to land on solid ground, we should launch him into the air again. They are laboratory mice with dry brains.
The South Korean philosopher is right: the digitalization of societies has undermined attention. There is no order anymore. Beginning and end. Birth and death. There is agony ad infinitum.
Our lives are now precarious as we do not have, or at least maintain, a certain direction. Some fixed goal. Even though it’s tiny. Destiny is made of pieces, since being liquid it never maintains the same shape. As a result of all this imbalance, our lives are defined by their transience and uncertainty. Our main concern is not to miss the train of wildly constant updating, in the face of the rapid changes that occur around us so as not to be parked in the space of the obsolete.
Let us never forget that narratives create bonds. They are a social glue that helps us know, discover, trust, believe, and live in tune with our times. Narrative makes us contemporaries. It makes us unique, in the sense that we share knowledge, experiences. Narratives give us back our identity. They reinforce and support it.
What connects and links us is born from them. And thanks to these characteristics we can found communities, overcome contingencies. Having a story allows us to recognize ourselves as human beings and prevents us from falling into disorientation and loss. Only narration is what elevates us and unites us through a common, transmissible story that makes the passage of time meaningful, providing a transformative power to society; It is the only one that can bring us together again around the fire to give meaning to our lives. That bonfire that demands concentration, reflection and leads us to the enigmatic and deep part of our psyche.
