Yes, I think that there is a difference between a story and a simple sequence or chain of events. I think this because although the story is based on a sequence of events, it is the anecdotes in between that make it a story instead of facts being repeated to someone. When we tell stories, we are relaying information in a way in which our target audience will want to listen and become engulfed in what we are saying. I think that it is usually helpful to have a beginning, middle and end to a story to help it flow along well. I also think that it is helpful for a story to have a storyteller that relies heavily on feedback from an audience. Since we are constantly communicating non-verbally as well as verbally, I think that we can create stories non-verbally without an audience that we know of, however, people may tend to pick up on the story we are telling without us even being aware of it. I think that this is where the meaning of a story is assigned, and I think that both the storyteller and the audience give it meaning, the storyteller by the way he or she relays the story and the audience by the way he or she interprets it.
I think that we tend to live in a narrative paradigm, because we are sometimes clouded by the media and their interpretation of how a story is told, which is sometimes skewed so that they will be able to shock people by tweeking information in order to sell magazines, newspapers…etc.
