While I was taking an environmental biology class last year, I had to watch two of the Story of Stuff videos: The Story of Stuff and The Story of Bottled Water. I found the videos interesting though a tad preachy when it came to what we should do.
Now having watched the rest I find it interesting how we can tell a story about something that we are using every day and shed a new light on it. An architect once told me while I was job shadowing him, “What we know the most about we notice the least.” This really holds true about telling stories and examining things we see every day.
For example, when looking at your laptop, you won’t notice a small speed decrease each day until you get frustrated that you are getting the hourglass/beachball of death every few minutes. We don’t tend to notice small changes until they all add up to a larger shift in how something is presented.
The Story of Stuff does a good job of breaking that barrier of thinking about things that we notice every day but never comment on. We should be noticing that there are small changes in advertising or product design but we don’t because we simply take everything for granted. We are not worried when an add changes one word in the last sentence to make a small change in how we perceive the company. We don’t think about why that iPhone is obsolete within 30 seconds of buying it.
Though I have to admit this is all ironic that I am watching these videos and typing this blog on a laptop that will eventually be thought as obsolete before it is actually obsolete. We forget that typewriters still work and old DOS machines can still crank out pi to several thousand digits. We simply contribute to the society that wants something new and shiny even though the old, well-worn things can still do exactly what we need them to do.