[syntheweave]

It has nothing to do with the kinds of stories I tell when I go for a walk, come back, and tell the household something about what I saw. "Today there were many crows, hundreds of them flying through the air." I can embellish that moment and add details like, "and one of them swooped down near me and I had to duck." And that's life information, that's like, "oh, being around birds can be dangerous." And yet it has no hero's journey in it, unless going for a walk is a "call to adventure". What it has is story elements: moments with meaningful relationship, encoded in a way that audiences can immediately digest. I once took a fiction writing class where one of the students could not filter her stories down beyond a bare enumeration of events that took place on a certain day: everything was included, the bathroom trips, the specific purchases, the things family members said to each other, the "oh, I forgot something, we need to go back". As a story, it was incredibly hard to follow because it was data, not information.

What does tend to happen as story elements get added and more tightly bound together is something resembling traditional story structures. But that's like observing that natural systems tend to look like scale-free networks: it's an "end-up", not a "fate". Most of the industrial products made to fit story templates are providing entertainment, but only a facade of information: the story is actually built on wish-fulfillment or appeal to preexisting beliefs(nothing sells like a story you want to hear because it validates you), and the formula suggests a way to fill up runtime reiterating that.

[camoufleur]

Your comment makes a lot of sense to me. But I think that "Today there were many crows, hundreds of them flying through the air" is your definition of data, not a story. Mentioning having to duck is either a detail (more data) or an event in an incomplete story e.g. if you go on to explain how you made a truce with the crows. There's information in the crow statement only if it communicates more than a proclamation that you went on a walk. People often hate when people tell them their dreams because it's (nonsensical) data mistaken for a story. There's no information.