Continuity and Change in Storytelling about Artificial Intelligence: Extending the Narrative Paradigm

which they communicatively highlight or de-emphasize. By using the communication strategies of anomaly-masking and anomaly-featuring, the stories' adherents reduce tension created when nonfitting relations become salient in a story. They direct attention away from the apparent complexity of experience. Yet, as Brown notes, the more human beings attempt to apply or "stretch" a story to explain as much as they can about human experience, the more unresolved anomalies will become salient until, from the point of view of the adherents, their system of sense-making seems to run down. For example, the more Newtonian physics was applied to understand experience, the more gaps in the form of unexplainable experience from the point of view of Newtonian physics appeared. Brown (1978) explains, "In such deviance-amplifying states, all ommissions, inconsistencies, and contradictions in ideology are apparently magnified to its followers" (p. 135). To the adherents, the worldview no longer seems to explain human experience—a system break occurs. But, from the point of view of the student of communication, an attention shift occurs. The human beings reorganize around a new story that seems to compensate for the gaps in the old. Brown's model allows the critic to speculate about cultural/social trends as revealed in patterns of communication. For example, in reflecting upon the stories currently evolving about the human/computer relationship, this analysis points to the potentiality that the human uniqueness story has been "stretched" to its limits and that human beings face an attention switch to an alternative story. As Bolter and Mazlish indicate, without the specific terminology, the human uniqueness story is an old one in which many anomalies have been masked in order to maintain it. With the rise of the artificially intelligent computer, the human/computer similarity story may compensate for the gaps in the old story and offer more explanation and prediction of human experience. But, as with the old story and as human beings apply the human/computer similarity story to explain and understand more and more situations, the more will anomalies become salient in this story. Initially, human beings will find ways communicatively to mask the gaps until the gaps become so unexplainable that attention shifts to an alternative story, perhaps back to the human uniqueness story. So, while over time, the meaning-making stories change, the process of storytelling remains continuous; continuity and change can be seen to exist concurrently in communicatively created social systems. Change occurs when the content of ideology shifts as human beings attempt to account for gaps in their comprehensive explanations for experience. Implicit in the change, though, is a continuous need for human beings to posit such overarching symbolic names and a continuity in the manner in which they construct, maintain, and change those names. In the end, from this particular approach, the question is not which one of these stories is better, because all are incomplete. Brown (1978) writes: [T]he rise and fall of what we are accustomed to think of as belief systems are objects neither for blame nor praise, mourning nor rejoicing. Their rising and falling, given the function of human symbol-use, simply are. As much as one might regret or welcome the passing of a particular ideology, the process of ideologizing will continue, (p. 139) Viewing the narrative paradigm from this approach suggests that the stories we tell are part of a larger pattern of continuity and change in the way in which we make sense of human experience. While this essay considers only the stories being told