Meta-narratives and the end of the world - Part 1

Now, if there was ever a meta-narrative that existed it would be the mass panic over end of the world or catastrophe events. We, as a human race, love the drama of disaster. I was reading this morning this feature, written by a senior NASA research scientist published in 2009 about what is supposed to happen on the 21st December this year. You can find it here.

Metanarrative, or meta-narrative is a concept I have been grappling with these past few years as it relates to my research. In particular, the Cultural Heritage Continuum model. You can see and read about this model in this paper by Frank Upward, my paper about Youtube video collecting by heritage institutions and see a couple of 3D versions of it on Youtube that I experimented with a few years ago. I will have to write some extensive explanations about this model in my thesis, so it seems I need to grapple some more with the terms and activities involved in it. 

The term, 'metanarrative', appears on the narrative axis, which progresses a small story, through group acceptance, organisational and community warrant to the meta. The narrative axis lies opposite to the storytelling axis, which contains activities related to the transformation of the tale through spacetime, where it ultimately becomes a story of domination whose influence is absolute. 

The paper I wrote in 2009 about the this particular continuum model focussed on these two axes. In this paper I used the term, 'meta-narrative' to describe the story and the way it is understood. I said that YouTube was a phenomenon, meaning that it had reached that mythical place beyond a brand name and a presence, but had come to mean online video, regardless of what website it was located on. But I also was mistaken in my explanation, as I said that the meta-narrative is actually a story - the story of "online social communities and how mediated communications can create both offline and online friendships and social networks with varying degrees of intimacy." I was referring to Patricia Lange's work on YouTube with that explanation, who I met last year in L.A. and is a very lovely and supportive fellow researcher. However, I am not convinced now this is a meta-narrative  for a few reasons:

1. I was telling the story of the outcome of Lange's work, not really describing a narrative. 
2. I believe now that narrative is mostly about shared understanding of conventions of structure. i.e. introduction, body, conclusion. 
3. The outcome of Lange's work is actually part of the story about YouTube, but not all. 

The reason why I am harping on about metanarrative is because I see it as a gap in my understanding about the model and this particular aspect of continuum theory.

More about why in the next post.