a cautionary tale

I'm watching a panel discussion that consists mostly of people telling stories they've been telling for years. Stories, of course, get ritualized as they are told, and the changes to them from that process are part of how they get less true. But then once they are ritualized, they're no longer able to be presented in a societally relevant context, and that poor aging is the meat of how they stop being true. In the worst case, it gets easy for the teller to simply forget that context entirely and dive into the ritualized storytelling without thinking about how the story has aged or whether it's a good idea to tell at all. (Tom, it was your extension cord story that got me thinking about this.)

I'm sure I've told stories I should have stopped telling. And I'm sure I've done that as part of a panel discussion. In fact even the story I'm telling now, about how stories get less true the more you tell them, is itself a story that I have found myself telling in ritualized form.

That's not to say that there's no place for story. And maybe the stories are better if the storyteller doesn't have to think, in the moment of telling, about which stories are still a good idea to tell. That could be some advance planning, or an edit pass, or for real time events a separate person whose job it is to curate -- an interviewer, or a panel moderator, or someone else who's familiar with the stories and can consider how they fit into the current context.

There's probably no single best answer for this. The current panel discussion has few enough people watching, and enough back-and-forth between the panelists, that making it a prepared recording instead seems easiest, and I bet that's the answer for a fairly wide swatch of convention programming as well. And as a side benefit, we'd have more content available for people who can't attend the conventions in question in person.