Stories are important and it’s precisely in recognition of the importance of storytelling that the #IBSA2020NewNormal project was created in collaboration with european influencers working across all areas of digital communication. We created the project because we’re a company that believes in research and innovation through and through. We created the project above all because we think that sharing stories is a great way of learning something new.
On our social media profiles, you can see an illustration by Hakan Keleş, a Turkish cartoonist. In the image, he combines houses with a drawing of two older people bumping fists in a greeting that was once the sole prerogative of American movie teens. After COVID-19, entire generations are united, breaking down personal and geographic barriers.
You can also be carried away in the dream of poetry, images and music by Peter Wyss, who tells his story of change through his depiction of an autumn meadow.
In the image of a mother with her child by barbellion.illustration, a simple line, half a face mask and slightly more subdued colours represent the fracture between before and after, as if to say that the change has been minimal, but you can still see it.
Then there’s the lesson from Hania Es, who in her video simply tells us what it means to take care of each other.
To finish this overview, passing over to the professional social media site, LinkedIn, Bianca Lopes, co-founder of Talle, a media company working in the tech and finance sectors, tells us about a new normal comprising ‘ancestral fears’ that lurk ‘inside the home, where we have sought shelter and tranquillity’. Hence, the imperative: to unlearn much of what we knew before in order to learn it again. According to Bianca, this is the road to building a new normal.
We’ve learnt two things from #IBSA2020NewNormal.
The first is that we each think our lives are ordinary until something makes them extraordinary, for better or worse, but since we get used to everything, even exceptional circumstances can become everyday and when we talk about a #newnormal it’s not easy to understand where the new ends and the normal begins.
The second is that to survive the changes around us we need stories, because people’s social and emotional lives are intertwined with stories, in all their forms. If nobody tells the story, it’s as if nothing has happened.