“See, machines can’t do anything without people.”
Narrative Change Part 3: What we can learn about socializing a counter-narrative from Mister Rogers and LinkedIn responses to ChatGPT
This is the third post in a four-part series on Narrative Change. Read the first two issues Let Me Tell You About my Invisible Labor and Milky Thighs and Ivory Towers.
Back in February, I found myself panicking—along with many others—that ChatGPT would make my job as a social sector storyteller obsolete. After playing around with the platform to generate a dozen mission statements and theories of change, I came to this rosy conclusion: ChatGPT can only generate generic language. I wrote an article to that effect.
I absolutely believe this to be true. But in the past several months, I’ve uneasily watched two narratives play out about AI and the future of our workforce. The dominant narrative is that AI is a competent replacement for human talent. One counter-narrative—which sadly reeks of desperation and comes off as bluster—is that AI is just hype and human talent is irreplaceable. This post isn’t about which narrative is true, but why the latter has been so ineffectual at countering the dominant narrative.
Around the same time that these narratives about the future of work began flooding my LinkedIn feed, my toddler and I started watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I was astonished by the show’s strong narrative throughline around the importance of manufacturing industry workers—a theme I’d never noticed when watching the show as a child.
In fact, Mister Rogers is as much a show about the American manufacturing industry as it is about child development and imagination. Before Mister Rogers takes the viewer into the Neighborhood of Make Believe in each episode, he often first takes them on a tour of a factory. In the past six months of watching the show, my son and I have toured a: crayon factory, rocking horse factory, graham cracker factory, eraser factory, ball factory, wagon factory, applesauce factory, towel factory, sneaker factory, macaroni factory…the list goes on!
At the factory, Mister Rogers travels from one station to another, delightedly explaining how something is made and intermittently stopping to marvel at the skill of individual factory employees.
“That looks like it might be very difficult to do,” he observes admiringly, as a rocking horse factory employee paints a jaunty stripe onto an assembled horse. “It takes a lot of practice,” his friend Mr. Mcfeely agrees.
“She really works carefully, doesn’t she,” he remarks, as a sneaker factory employee efficiently attaches rubber trim to a shoe. “I wonder whether she ever thinks about all the people who wear the shoes she’s helped make?”
“Anybody in your family like to cook?” he asks the forewoman of a graham cracker factory. “Yes my grandmother was a great cook,” she replies. “I often think about her when I come to the [factory] bake shop and smell the different smells.” Mister Rogers shakes his head in wonder and adds: “That’s a wonderful thought, someone who fed you, and here you are making millions of things for people to eat.”
In the episode my son and I watched this morning, Mister Rogers took us on a tour of a flashlight factory. As he observes a man running quality checks on the flashlights, Mister Roger says with evident satisfaction: “See, machines can’t do anything without people.” And after six months of daily factory tours, I agreed with him.
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood hit its stride in the seventies and eighties, around the same time that the U.S. manufacturing industry began to decline. This decline can be attributed to various economic factors that I’m not knowledgeable enough to write about, but it also went hand in hand with a growing narrative that manufacturing jobs were for the unskilled and unambitious. After all, the work was really being done by machines… wasn’t it? People began to push higher education as the only way to attain meaningful employment. (If you’re in the K-12 education sector, you’ll recognize the lingering stigma around trade school and the push for college-for-all.)
It’s clear that Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was tackling a narrative change. In the face of a dominant social narrative that dismissed manufacturing jobs as less than, the show championed a counter-narrative about the skills these jobs required and the tangible contributions of these jobs to society.
Off the show, Fred Rogers was explicit about why he’d chosen to embed factory tours into a children’s television program. He said: “My father and my two grandfathers worked in factories, and I was always interested in their work. When we show factories, they certainly have fascinating machines, but I always emphasize that it takes people to make machines and to make them work. I like children to know that people can take pride in their work and that everyone’s job is important.”
Magna Cartas don’t work
In many ways, the Mister Rogers show also sought to do what so many people in my own network are doing via frantic LinkedIn posts or in op-eds today. It sought to perpetuate a narrative about the significance of human workers to counter a dominant social narrative about their irrelevance in the face of advancing technology.
So why do these LinkedIn posts and op-eds from peers and colleagues feel like bluster and feed my anxiety, whereas when Mister Rogers advances the same narrative, I believe him and feel reassured?
Ultimately, Fred Rogers understood the fundamental aspect of narrative change: Magna Cartas don’t work. When I say Magna Carta, I mean the kind of comms that people put out to declare something is true—e.g. an org statement declaring that Black lives matter, a ballot initiative flier declaring that investing in free early childhood education is critical for our future, or a social media post declaring that ChatGPT can never replace human talent. It’s always explicit. Usually, it’s a standalone piece. And usually, its audience has already decided whether they agree or disagree with what’s being declared, based on the social narrative in which they’ve been marinating.
Social narratives are not Magna Cartas but instead made up of the countless individual stories that people are exposed to and filter through each day, in articles we read, images we see, lyrics we hear, anecdotes we’re told, conversations we have, or videos we watch. Each individual story implicitly advances a social narrative—about gender, race, smoking, the environment—that seeps into our subconscious and influences our belief systems. The more frequently a social narrative is implicitly reinforced through stories, the more compelling it becomes (see my post about implicit versus explicit storytelling).
If Mister Rogers declared in the first episode, “See, machines can’t do anything without people,” I might have dismissed it as an idealistic sentiment from a really nice man. But because I’d watched dozens of other episodes in which Mister Rogers drew attention to and admired the skills of various manufacturing workers—implicitly conveying the message that they were skilled—I already believed it by the time he made this explicit declaration in episode 1,586. Similarly, Mister Rogers never explicitly says, “People who work in manufacturing are skilled contributors to society.” He doesn’t need to; I’ve taken this message to heart.
You might be thinking, “But wait a minute! I don’t think the dominant social narrative about manufacturing workers did change in the seventies and eighties.”
You’re right. Ultimately, narrative change requires a proliferation of stories from a proliferation of sources that implicitly influence a new belief system. In the first and second issues of this series, I offered techniques for implicit storytelling (i.e. narrating process and overhauling biased language). But the proliferation of stories and sources comes down not to narrative craft but narrative socialization. However effective Mister Rogers was as a storyteller, he couldn’t effect narrative change alone. Despite the popularity and frequency of his television show, it was only one of dozens of stories that children and families were exposed to each day.
Socializing a counter-narrative
I’ll end by offering two strategies for socializing a counter-narrative.
First, repeat, reinforce, and repeat. Just like Mister Rogers did from 1968 to 2001 with his recurring factory tours. It’s worth it to point out that if Mister Rogers had simply repeated a Magna Carta—machines can’t do anything without people, manufacturing workers are important, etc.—for thirty-three years, it would have gotten old real quick. It was far more compelling to illustrate the point through his myriad little observations of factory employees.
Second, get the loudest storytellers to change the stories they tell. Mister Rogers was effective, not only because of how frequently and implicitly he conveyed his message, but also because of his popularity and influence—in other words, his relative loudness. He was a point of cultural connection between his millions of viewers. A kid might easily brag to another kid at the playground, “I know how balls are made.” The other kid might say, “I know, too! I watched them make balls on Mister Rogers! First the balls are teeny tiny and then a woman blows them up big!” The ensuing conversation might in itself become a story that implicitly conveys the significance of human workers.
In narrative change work, there are three types of stories. Stories that perpetuate the dominant social narrative, stories that perpetuate a counter-narrative, and stories that do neither. Usually, the loudest storytellers, e.g. media outlets and influencers, tell the first kind of story—which is a big reason why the dominant social narrative stays dominant. In order to socialize a counter-narrative, it’s important to get these storytellers onboard.
How do we get these folks onboard? This post is already way too long, so in the next and final issue of this narrative change series, we’ll explore that question through the lens of some narrative change work that I’ve been doing in Cleveland. Until then!
