Week Two... and still LOST!!!!!!

This whole blogging thing is new to me and I'm still not exactly sure how this is supposed to work but i am gonna go for it anyway.  On Monday in class when we started to talk about the short story "A True War Story" I was instantly intrigued.  While reading the story, I found it very hard to follow and that usually ruins a story for me, but something was different about "A True War Story". Despite being confused throughout the piece there were always lines that would come along that came flying off the page at me and kept me reading on.  The lines that struck me were the ones that talked about how do we really know if something is "true" or is it just a figment of the imagination. This is a very interesting concept to me because today a  lot of students and people in general have no desire to do their own research or get two opinions on a specific topic, however they hear or read something once and accept that as the absolute truth.  If every one's opinion or story of an event like the the author hinted at because of the fact that we do not always see everything in stressful situations or in class we also said that stories differ because what people see in an event is different based on that particular persons perception of the event is different, how can we ever be sure that we can trust almost any story we hear with out having to investigate for ourselves? With the complacency that has infiltrated our culture today we do not like to hunt around for the real truth. I mean that's why wikipedia is so popular right? Because of the lazy nature of today, how does our society ever come to settle even some of its more minor differences if all the stories on the same topic are consistently different where ever you go. The personal nature of story telling combined with the nature of our society today in my opinion will lead to more rifts in our society and we will continue down the path of not being able to think as individuals. We hear one story and one group will follow it like a mob while other go galloping off with another version and nobody bothers to combine or at least hear out both and make a choice for theirselves of what is accurate.  If this continues I forsee a continued loss in critical skills that help us through out our lives and therefore a loss in the over all quality of our lives. Just my thoughts and sorry if i rambled, sometimes its much easier to think about things than explain them so I hoped that had at lest a little bit of logical thought.

What is Story Telling?

In this day and age with all of the reading we do over the Internet, I feel that today storytelling is just simply our daily recitation of events that we may or may not embellish a little while we are having conversations with friends.  But before this age of technology storytelling was a valuable part of every culture.  Ancient cultures used story telling to continue and pass on the traditions of the past in place of the horrible history books that we have to read today.  Some of the stories that these cultures passed on became so magnificent that they have become immortal and are continued today in the formed of legends. So in essence story telling can be no bigger than the simple relating of events but yet can grow into the backbone of a culture.