My responses:

1) So says the Western mind. The Eastern mind would, I think, see it differently, maybe like this: the timelessness of a narrative is part of its charm.

2) I’m not saying there are ‘no rules’ to either improvisation or the Quantum Narrative. Improvisation does not mean ‘winging it,’ nor does it mean ‘no plan.’ Quite the contrary. There are rules. And they’re not improvised. The rules of the multiverse ALLOW FOR IMPROVISATION. That’s a big difference from the way you put it. There is plan, but it’s flexible to the point that it exists in a state of constant change. As for being ‘out of science’ and ‘into spirituality’, this statement itself expresses the duality that a Quantum Narrative resolves. Quantum mechanics is the overlapping of science and spirituality, says Fritjof Capra in his book, The Tao of Physics. That’s his story and I”m sticking to it ; )

3) I don’t propose ‘taking away’ the essential elements of narrative. Narrative is narrative, just likes physics is physics. It is all, ultimately, composed of the same stuff. What i DO mean to suggest with the concept of Quantum Narrative, is that the story experience, as Scott points out, is relative to its observer/participant. A story that’s Newtonian in nature will be pretty much the same experience for every observer. One that’s Quantum can still be shared by its audience, but can be also be a different experience for everyone in the audience. It’s still a story, with traditional story elements, and can be composed of the same ’stuff.’ It just might not be the same stuff for everyone.

4) My point is that the language of Newtonian physics explains the dynamite, and that the language of quantum mechanics had to be created before the atomic reaction could be perceived.

I really don’t think we diverge much on what a story is. It has a beginning, middle and end. It has heroes on quests, wise old men, shapeshifters, goddesses, monsters, and elixirs hidden in well-guarded caves. What I’m saying is that a networked environment demands new forms, and that these new forms cannot be defined in terms of the old forms.

Think about Rashomon. A story told by Kurosawa from four different perspectives. A movie based on two short stories written in the 1920s. The form of a motion picture could contain Kurosawa’s story, and so that’s the way Kurosawa designed it. It was limited by its linearity and running time. Limited by what a film could cost and still make money, etc. etc. These were the rules that defined the form, and within that structure, Kurosawa was liberated to create a kind of movie that had never been seen before.

Now let’s say that today, I want to remake Rashomon, only I don’t want to tell the story from the perspective of just four characters, that’s been done to death, I want to tell the story from the point of view of one million characters! We’d be sitting in theaters for a long time watching that movie. More likely it never would’ve gotten to the theater because of ‘problems with the length of the script.’ The problems of telling this story are not the same as the ones Kurosawa faced, so the solutions aren’t going to be the same, either.

This is the same challenge faced by brands operating in the networked world. New narrative problems call for new narrative solutions. I think quantum is a good way to characterize the new solutions, that’s all.

Thanks, Matt. Great points, and I appreciate the dialogue.

1) Humans exist linearly. The very definition of time is the observation and perception of measurable change from one state to another. This is why we respond to linear narratives — our lives are made up of beginnings, middles and ends, even if we sometimes require years or decades of distance from one of our own “story arcs” to see them as such. Also, stories are instruments of social education — we learn mores, morals, history and custom by being told story, not to mention that we use stories told to us to better understand our own experience. When we tell our own stories, the telling is shaped and influenced by the stories we have been told.

2) Equating quantum mechanics to improvised storytelling is somewhat mislead, possibly because of the common but over-simplified explanation that Newtonian physics = formulaic clockwork and quantum physics = chaos into perception driven reality. The fact is, Newtonian physics is the macro-scale result of pico-scale quantum physics… and what appears to be chaos actually behaves according to rules that operate at a very small, very fast scale. Quantum doesn’t equal improvised — if the rules of the multiverse were improvised, there would have to be an improviser… and now you’re out of science and into spirituality.

3) I think that by taking away all the essential elements of narrative, you’re left with something that is no longer a narrative… or, perhaps, like children at play who tell a story as they go along, it’s not a narrative until it’s been told. The end result is still narrative, though, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Looked at another way, even if people all over the world are telling their own stories from a “quantum narrative” foundation, the stories they end up telling each other are still “Newtonian.”

4) The comparison between an atomic reaction and a stick of dynamite speaks to this — because ultimately, both explosions occur because of a foundation of quantum effects. Newtonian physics is, again, the observable, macro result of unobservered, pico-scale quantum interactions.

Perhaps the real quantum narrative is simply the human experience, and storytelling (in whatever form, however you want to define it) is the “Newtonian” expression of that experience.

If you strip away roles in storytelling, you can begin to get out from under the onus of ‘I tell a story and you listen.’ Forget ‘Storytelling is something we do.’

Instead, consider, storytelling as something we are. It sounds strange to use a verb to describe what a noun is, but I would posit that our language heavily influences and shapes our view of the world (some would say it actually creates our world).

Playing with our language in counter-intuitive ways opens up many storytelling opportunities. And isn’t having fun a large part of storytelling?