Centre for Future Storytelling

Robert McCrum can be pretty bitingly funny:

According to the Times, some clever people at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are setting up a $25m ‘laboratory’ to ‘save the story’.

You could hardly make it up. The Centre for Future Storytelling declares it is going to ask ‘the big question’. This, according to one David Kirkpatrick, is ‘Can the story survive?’ in the age of mobiles, internet and satellite television. While it is at it, MIT may like to consider some of the other pressing condundrums of our time, for instance: ‘Is the Moon made of green cheese?’

I agree with McCrum—storytelling really isn’t in peril. Advancements in technology haven’t killed storytelling, just changed the way we access and process stories. Maybe that $25m could’ve been spent propping up bookstores and publishers, since it’s really storytelling in books that MIT seems most concerned with . . .