For the past year, the People’s Newsroom has been developing the idea of a storytelling commons. This article gives an introduction to what we think that means – and also why it is hard to put into words.
Storytelling Commons 101
As a very basic definition, a commons is a collective resource which is sustained by those who rely on it. It’s a different kind of social organisation from private property (the market) or public property (state). Rather than being ‘owned’ by an individual, company or state that mostly has the right to do what they like with it, a commons is cared for (or ‘stewarded’) by a community according to a set of mutually agreed rules. Usually, this community has – or hopes to have – a long-term relationship with the resource, so the aim of the rules is to make sure it can be sustained and regenerated, rather than extracting from it in a way that damages it for the future.
In countries like the UK, you might not hear much about ‘commons’ unless you’re part of particular conversations about alternative economics (though it is more likely if you live in places like Hastings, or Bristol, or rural Scotland…) But commons are all around us. When you cook a meal for a friend who is sick you’re part of the commons of care – the unpaid work of looking after each other that massively outstrips the care provided by the state or the market. When you use a language, or sing a folk song, or use Wikipedia, these are all different kinds of commons. In many ways it’s a very intuitive way to do things, because this is how we organised ourselves for most of human history.
So what is a storytelling commons? The People’s Newsroom Initiative was founded by people trying to reimagine journalism, and ‘a different kind of journalism’ is maybe the simplest way to describe what we mean. Rather than journalistic stories being something created by private companies like the Daily Mail, or by public institutions like the BBC, what if they were created by and for communities, according to a set of values and practices they had agreed together?
And what if the point of telling stories wasn’t to make money for media oligarchs, or to reinforce the power of other elite institutions, but to help us live together in more sustainable and communal ways?
In lots of ways, this would mean that the practices for journalistic storytelling became more similar to the way we share stories interpersonally, which mostly function as a commons. Stories that are told in social settings can’t really be bought or sold as private property, and although there are some related laws (like slander or hate speech) we don’t generally really think about the state when deciding which stories to share. Instead we probably think about social norms, what feels appropriate, whether somebody might be hurt by it, or just whether the people listening will enjoy it. It’s a kind of subtle but obvious process of living together, which is really what commons are.
Words and commons
Even though I just explained it relatively simply, over the past year as I’ve tried to talk about my work with the People’s Newsroom I have often found myself stumbling when trying to describe what we mean by ‘a storytelling commons’. This is actually a longer-standing problem in my life – before working on this project, I ran a campaign where we also talked about trying to build a ‘media commons’, which could also be quite difficult to explain. One thing I have got some clarity on through our learning journey is some of the reasons why this is so difficult.
I think in general the idea of commons and commoning is quite difficult to convey because they are not really ‘things’ but processes and relationships. When a commons involves something tangible like a piece of land, the tendency can be to think of the land itself as the commons, when in fact the commons is the collective agreements between the people that rely on the land e.g. about what plants to grow, how they are going to treat the land, how many animals to have there so on.
Then again, even using a term like ‘agreements’ implies that the commons is a formal, explicit structure that can be understood from the outside. While a group may create explicit rules when they are trying to establish a new way of doing things, in long-standing commons the agreements are likely to exist more as customs and cultural practices rather than a clear set of rules. To truly understand the commons you need to become part of that web of relationships.
This difference is familiar when it comes to forms of commoning that we all know well, such as languages. Languages are patterns that can be described through formal rules such as grammar, and it is possible to learn a language by studying those rules. But to actually use the language like a native speaker – to get the nuance, tell jokes and fully communicate – you need to learn more like a child does, by listening and copying those around you and understanding how it is used as part of everyday life.
I’ve found this quote from Silvia Federici, who has written extensively about the commons, really helpful for describing this dynamic:
“Throughout this process, I have never forgotten what people who already live a communitarian experience would say: “You live the commons, you cannot talk about them, even less theorise them.” That I imagine is because of the difficulty to give words to such a powerful and rare experience as that of being part of something larger than our individual lives… But words are necessary, especially for those of us who live in areas where social relations have been almost completely disarticulated.”
So, we have to hold the tension that commoning needs to be lived to be truly understood, but that precisely because we cannot live them right now ‘words are necessary’ to help us imagine them and bring them into being.
Words, commons and stories
And of course there is another reason that words are necessary: because the commoning we are talking about relates to stories, which are at least partly told in words. As we have gone through the learning journey, I’ve thought a lot about the significance of us talking about ‘storytelling’, rather than about journalism or news, for example. Precisely what we wanted to capture was that the focus was on the process – the ‘telling’ – rather than a particular output (‘story’). Even then, ‘telling’ is quite one-way, and over time we started talking more about ‘story sharing’ because this conveys more of a collective practice involving listening, responding, and weaving together stories.
One framing we found useful was to talk about ‘the story of the story’. How can we connect up the story as a thing or an object within a wider process of relationships, knowledge sharing and community building? We heard many inspiring examples from our cohort about how they try to decentre the ‘story thing’ in their organisational practice.
For example, Greater Govanhill is a community newsroom in Glasgow which produces a bimonthly magazine. While the magazine itself could easily be seen as ‘what they do’, we heard a much more expansive ‘story of the story’: the collective practices they used to decide the theme and article topics, and how they assess and communicate the impact those stories have after the magazine has been distributed. Similarly, we heard from National Theatre Wales about some of their long-term projects in Pembrokeshire and Wrexham, where a final performance has been just one small element of community engagement rather than the main focus.
Stories and organisations
A lot of the time, I have felt confident that using terms such as ‘story sharing’ or ‘the story of the story’ is capturing something useful and important. And yet, sometimes I have had these nagging moments of doubt – what is it that I’m doing again, and am I doing anything at all useful?
The word ‘story’ has lots of meanings which in lots ways lends itself to commoning – we can use the same word ‘story’ to refer to a news article, a plot in EastEnders, the ‘about us’ page on a website telling the history of their organisation, or your friend telling you about their weekend. But then again this expansiveness can make it feel quite vague and unclear – is everything then a story? I think this is particularly challenging because storytelling is a thing that all of us do as part of everyday life, but can also be connected to specific professions.
This professional context is probably one of the reasons that it can be difficult not to revert back to thinking of a ‘story’ as an end product. The groups in our cohort were all organisations who were trying to create the conditions for a just transition towards a different kind of world. However, in the here and now they all had to navigate systems of value and funding where organisations have to justify their existence. It is much easier to show what you’ve been up to through the articles on your website, the magazine you produced or the play that you put on, than it is to convey the value of a relational process to someone who was not part of it, like a funder. And of course I’ve also experienced some of the same professional pressures, to show others (and myself) that I am actually achieving something.
There was a bit of a penny drop moment for me when I suddenly realised that part of the problem is that organisations are not commons! Organisations as we currently know them are structures created to interact with the state and the market – to receive money and pay wages. The reason we need wages is because most of us are unable to meet our basic needs without money: we need to pay rent or a mortgage, pay our bills and buy food from the shops. And that is because of a long history of enclosure where land and resources have been taken from the commons and then sold back to us at extortionate prices.
In a future where much more of our lives are based on commoning, and where we can have much more autonomy from the state and the market, we won’t need organisations in the forms that we have today. That doesn’t mean that the work won’t happen, but that we can create different kinds of collectives which don’t have to demonstrate their value to funders or buyers in the marketplace, or police boundaries between the professional and everyday forms of storytelling. I think in that world there will be new possibilities for story sharing as an embedded part of living out the commons.