Here’s The Story
Humans like stories. Before the invention of writing and printing and the internets, the immense power afforded humans with their ability to share information through the magic of language was (and is) expressed in story form. Stories evoke an emotional response, helping the learning and memorization process, enabling our ancestors to share agriculture, hunting strategy, and other survival techniques with nearby villages and succeeding generations.
Stories are not bad. Not at all. But are they enough?
This Episode
One Small Step for News Reporting via Anchor.fm
Dan Hugo talks about some ideas regarding reporting of news as stories versus facts…
Episode Art Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
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Links and Notes
This is a repeat link to a presentation about a microservice architecture approach, one of many, many, many such presentations as The New Way to develop and deploy complicated services evolves with time and experience.
There is a rigorous workflow described here, aimed squarely at building systems which work as expected and which are not so susceptible to breakage due to what we could call “lost information.” If the process is clearly defined and transparent, it is more difficult to drop a fact and end up with something unexpected and incorrect exposed to the world. I’ve skewed that comment toward the reporting of news, obviously…
If one searches using your favorite search engine, there is no shortage of results along these lines:
How Telling Stories Makes Us Human
The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories?
And so on… stories evoke the emotional connection to content that invites the human mind to participate. We remember, we believe, and we share with others. Is this the best way? Maybe. Is this the only way? It does not need to be.
Event Sourcing?
If we continue with the Microservices analogy (or maybe more of an example thought experiment, the analog might break down if we push it too hard… for now, let’s focus on the parts and not the whole), what if journalists capturing news to report, were to add their findings to a central (centralized, democratized, or some scheme which we assume “works”) database or stream or repository which we (anyone) could examine at any time to watch the facts become apparent, perhaps become more focused with additional related facts, and sometimes become irrelevant as a particular fact might have been blatantly untrue or eventually inaccurate.
Would the Event Sourcing pattern work here?
Greg Young making a presentation about Event Sourcing in 2016
Ponder this: Which is a more convincing argument to consume? That is, whether you believe in this notion or not, reading an article about Event Sourcing, versus the story told about Event Sourcing, which makes you think more? Is one provacative and one an interesting reference?
This Topic Arc
Alternative facts, fake news, alternate media, and a host of other buzzwords describing what was agreed very early on in the founding of the United States, and certainly before, concerning News. Trust and Communication can be tricky in our modern world where instant sharing can turn fiction into fact and vice versa, and then what?
“I heard you should discuss this topic on the FFS Talk podcast.”
Who said that? Not sure. It is a true statement, however…
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Episode Art
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash