Vision -- How You Can Use 'SmartMemes' to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World

The following is an excerpt from Re:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World, by Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning (PM Press, 2010).

Our Approach: Story-based Strategy

The universe is made of stories, not atoms.

~ Muriel Rukeyser

Stories come in all shapes and sizes: daily anecdotes, movies, fables, or pre-packaged “news” stories created by the media. The stories we tell show what we value; the deepest personal narratives we carry in our hearts and memories remind us who we are and where we come from.

Historically, the power of stories and storytelling has been at the center of social change efforts. Organizers rely on storytelling to build relationships, unite constituencies, name problems, and mobilize people. Movements have won public support with powerful stories like Rosa Parks’ refusal to change seats, the AIDS quilt carpeting the National Mall in Washington, or the polar bear stranded in a sea of melted ice.

SmartMeme uses storytelling to integrate traditional organizing methods with messaging, framing, and cultural intervention. Our training curriculum explores the role of narrative in maintaining the entrenched relationships of power and privilege that define the status quo. Story-based strategy views social change through the lens of narrative power and positions storytelling at the center of social change strategy. This framework provides tools to craft more effective social change messages, challenge assumptions, intervene in prevailing cultural narratives, and change the stories that shape popular culture. Re:Imagining Change is an introduction to story-based strategy and outlines some of the analytical tools and practical strategies SmartMeme has used to fuse storytelling and campaigning.

We Are Made of Stories

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.

~ Zora Neale Hurston

We live in a world shaped by stories. Stories are the threads of our lives and the fabric of human cultures. A story can unite or divide people(s), obscure issues, or spotlight new perspectives. A story can inform or deceive, enlighten or entertain, or even do all of the above.

As humans, we are literally hardwired for narrative. Harvard University evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker argues that stories are essential to human learning and building relationships in social groups. There is growing consensus in the scientific community that the neurological roots of both storytelling and enjoyment of stories are tied to our social cognition.

In one widely cited 1944 experiment, psychologists Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel showed subjects “an animation of a pair of triangles and a circle moving around a square,” and asked what was happening. The subjects’ responses (e.g. “The circle is chasing the triangles”) revealed how they mapped a narrative onto the shapes.  Numerous subsequent studies have reiterated how humans, as social creatures, see stories everywhere.

Just as we tell ourselves stories about the world we live in, stories also tell us how to live. A myth is “a traditional story accepted as history that serves to explain the worldview of a people.” Myths may be mistakenly dismissed as folktales from long ago, but even today a sea of stories tell us who we are, what to do, and what to believe.

People use stories to process the information we encounter from our families and upbringing, educational institutions, religious and cultural institutions, the media, our peers and community. We remember our lived experiences by converting them to narratives and integrating them into our personal and collective web of stories. Just as our bodies are made of blood and flesh, our identities are made of narratives.