For someone who has watched the User Experience profession evolve from calling itself Information Architecture, to an array of User Experience roles, and is now beginning to question the term “user” as it considers the importance of the non-functional, emotional and story, the language of this passage from Walter Benjamin’s “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” is startlingly relevant:

Historically, the various modes of communication have competed with one another. The replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience. In turn, there is a contrast between all these forms and the story, which is one of the oldest forms of communication. It is not the object of the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thus bears the marks of the storyteller much as the earthen vessel bears the marks of the potter’s hand.

There is much to contemplate in this passage related to information, experience and brand, and the evolution of our commercial culture.