STORYTELLER GRANDPARENTS ARE VANISHING

There was a time when every family used to have a storyteller, generally grandparents. Now it is different. Electronic entertainment has taken the place of storytelling. Children prefer to know about mythical and fairy tale characters through TV serials. Grandparents don’t retire, and have little time to meet their grandchildren, and much less to interact. As Scientific American suggests, “people accept ideas more readily when their  minds are in story mode as opposed to when they are in an analytical mindset,” and “stories have such a powerful and universal appeal that the neurological  roots of both telling tales and enjoying them are probably tied to crucial parts of our social cognition.” Roger Schank has presented an interesting future scenario: The storyteller will be your computer. Computers will have built-in capability of understanding your needs, identifying the storyteller from the existing archive, and then delivering the story to you. “No more looking for information. Information will find you.  In this age of IT and communication, I hope and wish that both grandchildren and grandparents will continue with their one-to-one communication. I will be happy  to  see  less  dominance  of “next-generation  synthetic  performer technologies” in the future storytelling scenario. Computers can never acquire the feel of a storyteller. Storytellers of the past were our grandparents, and they should remain so in the future. The never-retiring grandparents must retire, if for nothing else, but for telling stories to their young awe-eyed cross-legged young friends. I can’t think that computers can convey the happy endings with the same feelings as grandparents do.