Summary
‘Narrative oceans’ is the Pop Culture Collaborative’s name for the surrounding environments of stories, ideas and norms that people live inside and come to take for reality. Its CEO, Bridgit Antoinette Evans, explains the image: “all of us are immersed in these kinds of deep, all-consuming environments, except instead of water swirling around us, there are narratives and stories and ideas and norms”.
An ocean is bigger than any one story. Evans’s example is a hit film: what changes culture is the fandom, commentary and community that gather around it and outlast it. Oceans can be strengthening or toxic, so changing culture means changing them.
Rationale
We reach for the same water: Part 1 borrows Suzanne Dhaliwal’s “undertow beneath the surface of the ocean”. Evans hopes for ‘never-go-back moments’; we doubt any shift holds while other environments keep tugging people back.