Fiction for a Better Tomorrow is not just about writing but about storytelling and communication.
Any art can be used for communication, through art we can express, support or challenge worldviews.
📝 Writing requires active engagement, the reader participates in creating the scenario through reading the text. The best writing draws the reader in so that they experience what it is like to be another character or to live through an event. An engaged reader will put themselves in the position of characters and develop an understanding and empathy that was not there before.
🎨 Visual arts are more open to interpretation, a viewer may find deep profound meaning or nothing at all or they may even find something in the work absolutely unrelated to the artist and their own motivations.
🎶 Music captures our minds and emotions, it gets into our muscles and makes us move. Music can lift us up and carry us away on a journey of both meaning and feeling or connect to memories and emotions already nascent within us.
🎥 Video is profoundly effective. With the audience in a passive posture immersed in an audio visual journey. The versatility of the medium allows for a wide range of techniques to engage attention and play with sensory experience.
🎮 Games can combine any and all of these other mediums with both active and passive elements. The narrative can be more immersive and engaging than other mediums because the nature of a game includes audience participation and choice, modeling real world interactions. As a result games can have profound impact on our personal understanding and development.
💻 Even websites and social media, especially social media, can influence our thinking, beliefs and actions through exposure and inoculation. Social media employs repetitive messaging, behavioral modeling, trendsetting, nudges, reward incentives, filter bubbles, echo chambers and other powerful mechanisms for crafting an experience of reality that can be adjusted.
🎬 The biggest movies, music, books and games usually cater to a common denominator to reach the widest audience because they are designed to be products. Media is designed to push primal buttons, to elicit emotional response and it is not always done in the best interest of the individual.
What if our media was intended to be a transformative experience? What if it was intended to expand our horizons and challenge our assumptions?
What if media creation and consumption was a intentional exercise towards universal social goals?
How can the art and recreation that we interact with daily become more beneficial to us as individuals and as a society?
