Storytelling, as the saying goes, is the oldest form of communication in the world. From cave paintings and oral narratives to the invention of paper and, then, written scrolls, every new medium has given rise to a new form of narrative. In Europe, the coming of the printing press and movable type in the fifteenth century led to the emergence of news sheets and the novel. The motion picture camera of the 1890s led to the development of feature films. The birth of the internet and social media have now given rise to the world of ‘content’ where everything — from the bizarre to the breathtaking — is a potential story. But who gets to tell these stories? This is the question that lies at the heart of a lawsuit that Humans of Bombay, a story-telling platform, has filed against its peer, People of India, accusing it of stealing HoB’s intellectual property — namely its format of storytelling. Incidentally, HoB itself took inspiration from an American content creator who started the format of posting photographs of people along with a snippet story about their lives. The legalities of this case aside, the controversy underlines the fact that the ethics of storytelling may not always be that obvious.
These, admittedly, are not new concerns in the creative field. Authors, for instance, are often accused of preying on other people’s lives. There has also been much debate of late regarding an author’s right to write about the lived experiences of other communities — a white author articulating the voice of an African or Asian character is vulnerable to criticism for appropriating experiences that remain alien to the writer. Allied journalists reporting on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American reportage on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Western photojournalists’ accounts of African famines have been among other instances of storytelling — textual or visual — that have faced charges of appropriation, even purloining. The advent of social media, with its bevy of bloggers and content creators, has sharpened the tension. The first flashpoint concerns consent. Here too, the proverbial lines are not always in black or white. When a bystander recorded and chronicled the chilling tale of George Floyd being murdered by the police, she did not have the officers’ consent. But her story sparked yet another spirited debate on institutional racial discrimination in America. Monetising storytelling is the other quandary. As the HoB episode has shown, public consumption of stories is lucrative for the writer or content creator but not always so for the protagonist. Then, there are market forces at work: once a story is sold, who does it really belong to? The protagonist, the author, or the consumer?
Telling someone else’s story is a beguiling craft: it cannot be guided by a definitive set of rules. But since powerfully told stories can inform and shape public opinion, there is a definite case to demand great responsibility and ethical fidelity on the part of storytellers.
