How we tell our stories, lionize our heroes and iconize our beliefs is emblematic of who we are as a culture.

What’s fascinating as a step beyond Marshall McLuhan is how this speaks not only to form as content, but how form itself is a reflection of how we as a society embrace these heroes and share the stories that mythologize them.

Back when McLuhan was explaining his thesis, he called out movies as a form that in itself, created icons by the very closed nature of the medium.

How movies demanded a collective suspension of disbelief, people crowding into theaters in the dark to be willing subjects to a tale.

The very idea of a movie star’s persona was both emblematic and indigenous to the format. We had a static relationship to our icons, taking them as an idealized image of themselves not the living people behind them.

They were literally on the silver screen, we in our seats with popcorn.

Times and the medium have shifted completely.

It’s dawned on me that episodic storytelling is possibly not only the medium of our times but in some ways indicative of the changing morality and ethics of how we live.

Think about your relationship to the episodic series that are important to your lives. That stylize your evening’s entertainment and the blog communities that drive the pulse of your days.

Think about how you internalize a snapshot of what you take away from a movie classic and how that differs from your relationship to Frank Underwood or Walter White, even Tony Soprano.

How if you are a movie geek like myself you may have watched the Jeanne de Florette duology a dozen times, but you’ve spent weeks of your life living with these characters.

And ask yourself whether you are that close to them in spite of their moral and behavioral ambiguities–or because of them?

Why week after week, or during a weekend binge, episode after episode you want more, even when an episode is a complete fail.

This is not an individual character hiccup or one soured emotion that you take away from a movie.

This is like a family member gone momentarily stupid. A friend on a bender seeking solace.

These are our stories, the collective mythos of our lives actually in a strange way by how we connect with them.

You accept them with the tolerance of a communal experience or the embrace of a friend who has done something dumb but you are still there to support them.

I’m fascinated where this is taking us as a collective generation.

We are closer to our heroes and inspirations as part of our daily lives. And this proximity bridges the gap between ourselves and our ideals of who we can be and the acceptance of our collective shortcomings.

We are in a way, redefining beauty as something more approachable and common to us all.

Genius as an attribute we are all capable of at moments.

And the reality that the best of us can act like total asses at times, the most attractive of us simply imperfect.

This is a potential behavioral change with long cultural and societal legs.

We live in a well lit stream of public awareness, almost a social cam, that has shifted our views on privacy. Even more telling, it has transfigured our sense of what perfection means to each of us personally and how we’ve remythologized this through our fictions and stories.

How this has casualized the idea of beauty and the normalization of perfection that have permeated our daily lives. Not mundane but casual, not less sexy or special, just more grounded to the real human experience.

And with this our scales of value have become more graspable and real, reflected not only in how we act to each other but in the art that we create.

How the web and our always-connected status quo is the culprit and each of us the recipients of the positive upside of this shift.

The culprit because it makes episodic life possible and the norm, and the upside aftermath because as a result, society becomes more open and more tolerant.

This has occurred as a slow evolution, not a revolution.

It is not because of a huge collective moral aha, but simply we all live in glass houses of sorts and have mythologized this in the art and ethics that define and guide us.

This change is moving horizontally touching just about everything in the fabric of our lives.

From images in fashion, to mollifying the ideal of perfection in food and wine. To how we tolerate foibles and imperfections in our business and political leaders and super stars.

This is goodness.

Goodness that this is by definition breaking taboos, crashing professional glass ceilings and making the possibility of diversity and heterogeneity the norm.  It’s not there obviously but the awareness of the need to get there certainly is.

I am not choosing episodic storytelling over movies.  Although I’m a bit at a loss to think about them side by side.

I am not thinking that the Underwoods or the Sopranos are the new Beaver Cleaver family. But maybe in a weird and interesting way they really are.

I do know that this medium is real and emblematic to who we are today. An expression core to our changing culture.

It’s been a huge aha for me.

I’ve struggled to get this down but it’s important to me. Less about understanding the why of this connection, more about how its changed language and personalized the medium of storytelling.

How with the tools at hand and the networks we live on, we have the ability to connect storytelling and community building.

The freedom to be more bold and open as a way to forge deeper bonds with our communities, be they personal or business.

When culture changes, language and marketing need to change along with it.

That’s the theme I’m going to explore next.