One campfire, infinite stories

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This week we’re quoting…

Laurie Anderson (Performance Artist and Musician) 

What Anderson said: 

“Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.”

Let’s not go setting fires around tech, now 

We’d like to make it clear that we’re not encouraging you to actually put your tech devices in close proximity to a fire. Don’t do that (thanks). 

No; we just love this quote because it has become very much a truth for people around the world. 

Since humans figured out how to strike stone and wood and metal to make fire, we’ve gathered around fires. We’ve told stories in the flickering light – tales of our ancestors, myths that explain our purpose, lessons of survival. Fires gave us warmth and protection and the capacity to cook, but they also became the centre of our shared experience. 

This was the inspiration behind our Fireside Chats at LEAP 2025. We wanted to create a warm, personal way for our visitors to learn from the leading minds in tech. 

Because these days, most of us don’t sit around a fire to chat. Or at least not very often. Now, technology has taken the place of the ancient fire in our lives. Tech is how we come together, where we tell our stories, and where we create new imaginings about who we are. 

We need human connection. And the image of the fire captures something important about how we connect in the digital age: tech is the new gathering place, with the power to inspire us, bring us together, and shape the way we see the world. 

We all tell each other stories 

Think about the last time you were really captivated by a story. Maybe it was on TV, in the cinema, in a book, on a podcast, online somewhere. It felt like it was written just for you, with exactly the feelings you needed to feel and exactly the lessons you needed to hear. 

Most of the time these stories reach us through screens these days, instead of through the spoken word around a fire. But the impact they have matters just as much. 

And actually, tech has made storytelling more democratic than ever. You don’t have to be a published author or a filmmaker or journalist to share your story widely. If you have a smartphone, you have the tools you need to document and share your life, your struggles, the  wisdom you’ve gained along the way. We don’t have any stats on this, but we reckon very few people in the world today rely solely on traditional media for information and stories. Instead, we’re all listening to each other – every single day – through tech. 

This is amazing. And it’s also…a lot. In an age of endless access to endless voices and narratives that compete with each other in the same social media feed, we have to ask: Are the stories we’re gathering around intended to bring us together or pull us apart? 

When we asked Otto Plesner (Creative Director at RenaiXance) about the role of creativity and art in integrating new tech into our lives, he said:

“There is nothing like art that can spread positivity – even if at times the message can be dark, it still holds profound truths which then in turn is positive since it may open people's eyes towards issues in the world. So by using art as a cultivator of technology one inherently creates positive outcomes.” 

Tech as the fire that connects us

Not everything about tech is good. We all know this. But as Stephanie Singer (Creative Director at BitterSuite) put it when we interviewed her for the blog, “...tech isn’t just one thing; it’s a palette of colours, a set of tools we can choose from. What matters is how and why we use it.”

And technology is being used to deepen human connection in ways we never imagined. 

We can stay close to family even if we live on opposite sides of the world. We can spark real-world positive change by telling our stories online. We can make art and find an audience, and touch the lives of strangers. We can find people in our city (even a city that’s home to many millions of other people) who share the same interests as us. 

Tech can never replace our need for human connection. Instead, it gives us new ways to connect and makes connection possible in a globalised, fast-paced, complex world. Enables us to build communities. And because it allows us to tell our stories and absorb the stories of others, it can help us make sense of our experiences and – hopefully – make us feel less alone in the world. 

Finding the warm fire in a digital world 

Every storyteller has a responsibility – and we’re all storytellers now. In digital spaces we’re building a collective story and each of us has to choose how we want to contribute to that. 

Equally, when we’re part of the audience, the kinds of stories we decide to gather around are important. 

So no; most of us aren’t sitting around open flames, telling tales into the night. But the essence of that is still with us. We’ve brought it here, into our digital lives; the glow of the fire represented by the glow of a screen, but the need to connect and share? 

That’s timeless.

Have an idea for a topic you'd like us to cover? We're eager to hear it. Drop us a message and share your thoughts.

Catch you next week,
The LEAP Team