yonder (n): a far distance.
e.g., My grandfather used to point to the tree line and tell stories that took place “over yonder.”
yonder (v): to wander widely in search of stories
e.g., “I believe I will go yondering today.” “Him? He’s a yonderist.”
We live in an age of data. Everywhere we turn we are, we are told, counted and measured in ways that mostly escapes our ability to comprehend. Every telephone call we make is logged somewhere. If we are driving, every turn we take is logged somewhere. If we are on-line, every link we follow is logged, and every page we scroll is noted. Much of this is, we are told, is for our benefit.
And so it seems almost inevitable that with the rise of data, and the power it promises, or threatens, to have over our lives, that there would be a perceived need for something to balance that power, to limit it in some fashion. Over and against the granularity, the sandpile of bits of data that our lives would seem to be reduced to when run through the necessary grindstone of computer algorithms, we find ourselves wishing for something that understands us, or at least we understand, as a whole, something that is greater than the sum of its parts and by its very nature depends lives and breathes because of things it draws upon that are of it but not in it.
In what seems like the opening act of the data drama that will shape our lives, and our futures, in ways that we cannot yet anticipate—and yet so many individuals and companies are banking, quite literally, on our anticipation—we seem to have stumbled upon, or fallen back upon (however you prefer to imagine it), the strength of stories.
Stories offer us just such a thing. We can take them apart, and we can understand how they work. We can situate them within socio-cultural matrices. We can determine a great deal, with patience and with care, how they work, and in the process our admiration for their abilities to capture our imaginations only grows and intensifies.
Yonder.ist explore stories and storytelling