Narratable and Unnarratable

A productive news source can only be productive if they are able to make a discretion between good news and great news. But who decides whether something is worthy of mass knowledge and popularity when, as Gerald Prince said in his work “The Disnarrated”, “One narrators unnarratable may very well be another’s narratable”[1]. Prince also makes it clear that ordinary events can be “strange, uncommon, dangerous, or amusing that makes them strange and artistically potent”[1]. As Fischer lays out for us in “Productive” these and many other factors make for a compelling narrative that leads to highly globalized distribution; hence, glocal decoding[2]. Galtung/Ruge/Ostgaard published in the Journal of Peace and Research their evaluation of what is good news or “news value”. Two component of news value stated by Galtung/Ruge/Ostgaard that may fly under the radar, but have the utmost importance are “frequency and scarcity”[3]. Psychology tells us that obedience comes from a longing to belong, which applies to frequency because in a case of mass appeal such as Facebook the obedience to join as a young teen may arise from peer pressure to not be left behind the social norm. Scarcity is appealing to human nature because the longing for fresh information and a leg-up on the competition could only produce something positive.

The unnarratable is harder to pinpoint because the narratable is so vast. Price describes the unnarratable as “that which, according to a given narrative, cannot be narrated or is not worth narrating because it transgresses a law (social, authorial, genetic, formal), or because it defies the powers of a specific narrator (or those of any narrator) or because is falls under the so-called threshold of narrativity( it is not sufficiently unusual or problematic)"[1]. In other words, something so bland and average just need not be said. One cannot point out a specific event that falls under unnarratable without knowing context because it is very possible that something common can occur in a very uncommon situation. Somebody tying their shoe can suddenly be narratable if a one-hundred dollar bill is stuck under their foot.
[1] Prince, Gerald. The Disnarrated. Vol. 22. 1988. 3. Print
[2] Fischer, Annemarie: “Productive” Narrative Model.
[3] Galtung, Johan/Ruge, Mari Holmboe: The Structure of Foreign News. The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba, and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, vol. 2 (1965), pp 64-91.