In my post, at the beginning of March, entitled Why We Read Fiction, I mentioned two reasons, offered by Lisa Zunshine, which were: to improve our mind reading skills and to improve our theory of mind. I agreed that these are both legitimate reasons for reading fiction and went on to say "We also read fiction to learn values and vicariously experience situations." This idea about why we read fiction got stuck in my mind as I began to expand the question. What are the various reasons why people read fiction? What are the reasons why people write fiction? Do the two overlap? If a writer writes a piece of fiction for one reason, will the reader read it for the same reason or a different one? You might ask why anyone would think of such questions and all I can say is that is how my mind works. I don't really have a choice. But, for the moment, I am going to put a bookmark on this line of thinking so that I can explore another idea and then bring them back together.
I just finished my third non-fiction Kindle book entitled The Ghost of Socrates: Exploring Philosophical Issues in Information Systems. It examines questions such as "Is there really any knowledge in knowledge management systems", "do we really have a 'right' to privacy", "can machines be intelligent", "how does technology influence the distribution of social power" and so on. It is available at the Kindle Store on the Amazon website. I only have it available as an e-book for now as I need to learn a few things in order to make it available in paperback. Having finished that project, I began pondering my next project. I actually have plans for several books. But, I do not necessarily do them in order. I usually wait until I finish one and then try to decide what I feel like doing next.
[While plugging my books, I should also mention the recent publication of my first fiction work called Identity. It is available on Amazon in the Kindle Store as well.]
I decided on "How to Write Stories to Explore Possible Worlds" which has a long history of not being written but for which the time has now come. Back in the mid 1990's, I was interested in Computer Ethics. I had the realization that the biggest problem in computer ethics was that we were trying to assess the moral quality of certain ideas in the context of the present rather than in the context of the world that the technology would bring about. I tell a story in my book Predicting the Future about a class of MBA students from around this time who totally rejected my claim that in the future you will carry your phone around with you and the network will find you. They thought this was a terrible idea. They came up with some very predictable reasons why this would never happen. And, yet, it did. How could such bright, promising young students be so wrong? The answer is fairly simple. They were evaluating the claim that I had made based on present conditions and not on conditions that lie in the future which are brought about by the technology.
It occurred to me that in order to make a less biased assessment one would have to write a story or perhaps several stories about a future world in which this claim was true. I wrote several papers on the role of stories in computer ethics and eventually ran out of steam. The main barrier to this idea that I saw was that most people in the computer field who knew enough about the issues simply did not know how to write stories. So, I decided to develop a method for writing stories and developed a course in writing stories to explore the ethics of technology. I taught the class for six or seven years and planned to eventually write a book based on the material I had gathered and things I had learned from the class. But, I held off because I felt the idea was still not quite complete.
As I was writing Predicting the Future I talked a lot about how one must use their imagination to come up with possible outcomes and then assess those outcomes in terms of likelihood and impact. At the time, I did not see any connection between the stories book and the predicting book. But, eventually it clicked and I realized that stories can be used to gather knowledge about possible futures for the purposes of ethical analysis, policy making, and decision making. So, the book was re-titled Writing Stories to Explore Possible Worlds. People often ask writers where they get their ideas from. This is one of the ways, but only one of many, and most are just as complicated to explain. This is why writers, when asked such a question, often shrug and say something evasive.
To tie this back to the original topic of this post (which was why do we read fiction), we can add to the list of reasons why writers write and why readers read is to explore possible worlds. But, in fairness, I must admit that exploring possible worlds, along with mind reading, are perhaps at the more arcane end of the list. So, in my next couple of posts I will compile a list of more common and more pragmatic reasons for reading and writing.But, before I go, I would like to point out that as the future comes at us faster and faster our need to understand what is coming, along with its implications, will grow. And as that happens, the need to explore possible worlds will grow as well.
