The Truman Show Never Ended

In 1998 a rather interesting film called The Truman Show appeared with what must have seemed like an absurd premise. A man lived his entire life in an artificial environment constructed by a television company while 1.7 million fictitious viewers watched him go about the rather unremarkable business of living. He ate breakfast, went to work, interacted with friends, and generally did everything that ordinary people do without imagining that anyone would find it entertaining. The remarkable premise was not the elaborate deception but the assumption that millions would actually want to watch the everyday life of another human being. Fast forward twenty-eight years to 2026. There is a woman named Sathi, like many others, who has approximately 1.2 million followers on a popular social media platform. With the support of her husband, she produces reels documenting her everyday life. She cooks, shops, spends time with her family, and does the thousand little things that constitute the ordinary experience of being alive (If you send me a direct message I can share the public domain URL). Yesterday, Sathi gave birth to her first child. For her followers this was presumably a moment of genuine happiness. The birth was not simply information about a woman they had never met. It was the next significant event in a narrative that had become part of their own lives. This is where things become interesting. One of the more intriguing characteristics of narratives is that their power does not necessarily reside in what they are about. It resides in their continuity as in the case of the life of the fictitious Truman and the life of real Sathi. A single reel of a woman cooking breakfast is unlikely to produce much emotional investment. But when the same woman cooks breakfast tomorrow, goes shopping the following day, and subsequently shares something about her family, the individual events begin to acquire meaning because they are connected. Continuity produces familiarity. Familiarity produces intimacy. And intimacy, rather conveniently, begins to masquerade as authenticity. Current technologies makes the manufacture of this authenticity available to anyone interested in creating "authenticity" through continuity. Eventually, the never-ending story becomes a source of meaning in our own lives. But the combination of continuity and democratization has a rather inconvenient habit of distributing opportunities for mischief . In The Truman Show, the audience knew that Truman's world was artificial. When he finally discovered the deception and walked out, viewers experienced the vicarious pleasure of his liberation. In Sathi's case, the emotional response to the birth of her child is equally understandable. The child is real. The pregnancy was real. There is no particular reason to question the happiness of the family. But the narrative is still a construction. Narratives necessarily select, organize, and connect events to produce meaning. Eventually, the continuing narrative becomes its own evidence. We believe because we have been watching, not necessarily because we have verified anything. This creates a rather troubling possibility. A malicious actor does not need to manufacture a spectacular falsehood. The danger is not simply misinformation but the manufacture of an entire narrative environment in which credibility is accumulated through continuity. The mechanism that produces genuine happiness through another person's experience can also produce genuine conviction through a manufactured one. And like the Truman Show and the story of Sathi these manufactured narratives, from political to financial, eventually becomes “real” and the attempted basis of real action. Therein lies the power of narratives – fictional, real or intentionally malevolent. We eventually believe and act and that is what the narrator wants to reach - an intended outcome that has been offered by contemporary tools of gaining agency on narration.  This is why the Supertramp song reminds us to be careful of and see when it gets to the point of, “Ooh, it's getting unbelievable.”