In this update, I'm happy to share an article just published in China Information. An earlier version of it was presented in several talks, one of which was at UBC Green College. This talk contains one of my key arguments, which is the central role of anecdotes in digital storytelling, a tradition that goes all the way back to early Chinese historical and philosophical traditions. Modernity is associated with a scorn for "anecdotal evidence," but in early Chinese philosophical and historical writing, the anecdote was the preferred mode of discourse, not because early Chinese thinkers did not care about general principles, but because they always try to see the general (or universal) from concrete historical experiences (such as captured in anecdotes). See Chun-chieh Huang, “The Defining Character of Chinese Historical Thinking” (2007).
Is it by coincidence that anecdotes (and other very short forms) are also the preferred mode of discourse in today's digital culture?
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