In this latest installment of my series about how stories work, and how people use them, I’d like to continue talking about methods of version control. Specifically looking at how “official” versions of stories are distributed from a centralized source, and how they are challenged by unofficial by alternate versions of the same stories distributed through other methods.
For background, you might like to check out the two posts which immediately precede this one:
To summarize the above, stories are naturally modified by people when they retell them. With some kinds of stories that is okay, but with others, people have created methods to preserve a story intact against modification. Two of the most popular ones are creating a consistent fixed-format for your story, and then distributing only that specific version of the story.
Examples of this strategy can be seen in both religious history as well as contemporary mainstream media. Over time, the followers of Christianity created a vast amount of literature, which contained a great deal of conflicting stories and interpretations about Jesus’ exploits, and those of his followers. In order to consolidate its status not just as a religious & cultural entity, but as a political one, the Catholic Church held several councils early in its history to narrow down this wide field of religious literature. Based on a variety of factors, these councils selected particular texts which they supported, and which became the “official” books of the Bible as we know it today. These are known as the Canon. Versions of the Christian stories which they did not use, but which still were popular among the people and among non-mainstream sects are called Apocrypha.
Throughout the history of the Catholic Church, apocryphal texts saw various levels of acceptance. Certain of them retained a measure of popularity and use throughout the Middle Ages. Others though were more harshly persecuted. Basically, the idea of “heresy” stems from the notion that you are too deeply involved in non-canonical interpretations of the Christian story. You have deviated too far from the accepted official versions of the stories and rituals, and as such you are seen as a danger to the maintenance of their version control.
The same thing is very much happening in contemporary culture with mainstream media. Previous to widespread use of computer technology, the creation and distribution of major stories in a culture was controlled by things like movie studios, publishing houses, record labels. Their stories were maintained by the fixed formats which they put them in, and by the fact that the only way to get these stories was to buy access to them. Digital technology has forced a shift though, making formats of stories much more open to modification. And lateral network distribution have begun to bypass traditional top-down centralized distributions.
This has, of course, caused a backlash from mainstream media companies. Just look at outcry of movie studios and record labels, and the outlandish lawsuits levelled against people for file-sharing. These are basically equivalent manuevers to the historical Church prosecution of heresies. They perceive a threat to their official canonical versions of their stories, and to their centralized distribution system. They are worried that people are going to be able to: (1) get their stories outside established channels (download for free, in other words); (2) modify their stories (violating intellectual property law); and (3) create and distribute their own stories, which will compete with mainstream ones.
As I said, I believe the modification of stories by their re-telling to be a natural process. This of course is a threat to institutions which build their cultural status by creating stories and instituting strict version control on them. It’s a clash that is only going to become more pronounced in the near future, leading ultimately to what I would consider a New Media equivalent to the Protestant Reformation, in which the monolithic entity of the Church was shattered into smaller competing factions, which ultimately helped to move the culture forward into a new phase.
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- Contemporary Apocryphal Culture
- Origin of Copyright and Authorship
- Canon + Fan-Fiction = Fanon
- Apocrypha & Canon
- Religion over politics
