Couplets
I’m a regular listener of the excellent Empire podcast, hosted by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple. They’re currently focusing on Persia. A highlight is their episode on Ferdowsi, a poet credited with reviving Persian culture through his epic poem, the Shahnameh. I was so drawn in by the episode that I’m currently wading through the Penguin Classics translation.
The epic consists of 50,000 couplets. This struck a chord with me. The Bhagavad Gita is also written in couplets. Indeed, across the Middle East and Asia, couplets seem to be the favoured form to pass information forward through time.
I then stumbled on toward Shakespeare, form, meter, feet, and ended up very confused at iambic pentameter. I moved on. I can see why free form poetry is so popular.
Talking of form…
Is this story storying?
I understand this is how the kids are speaking now. When something is a good example of its type, it is deemed to be whatever-ing. So a good hoodie is hoodie-ing. I love this expression, but much too uncool to actually use it.
This, along with a few other trends, got me thinking about how we tell stories. How we tell them online has changed. So, what is a good story now? I’ve spent much of the month discussing, thinking and playing around with storytelling. How we do it. And how we might do it better. Particularly with data. And especially in a world when we’re all just little faces on a screen. Perhaps the storytelling techniques of TikTok might be applicable to Teams or Zoom?
My answers for better storytelling so far include winning attention early and the use of jeopardy to create urgency. Short form stories and media might be a readymade template for this. If you want your zooms to be zooming, then your stories need to be storying.
And speaking of better…
Better vs Faster (the inevitable AI section)
My thinking on AI this month has focused on how we can learn more in order to make better decisions, rather than just produce things faster.
Much has been written and said about the inevitable forward progress of technology. I don’t disagree with it. The Luddites didn’t stop the looms. However, all fabric is not equal. A loom can make a coarse woollen cloth, or something finer and more valuable. The latter takes new knowledge. That’s where I’m most interested in playing.
Of course, one of the paths to new knowledge is to free up time to explore. So, perhaps faster is an enabler of better. It’s an “and” not an “or”.
On AI, I’m going to move faster. My goal, though, is to land at better.