I suspect that the literacy of story telling declines with the emergence of public media. I saw this with my grandfather, 19th century born Italian shepherd, whose story telling diminished in direct proportion to the amount of TV he watched. Growing up, the culture of porches and kitchens where no TV lived was always richer than the story wasteland of the room where TV dominated and made live stories irrelevant by replacing them with strings of facts simulating stories. Today, when I tease people I meet with, "So, what's your story?", I often get the string of facts that lack the emotional power of stories. When we regain a deep love of emotions, we will regain our love of stories.