Technically it means story telling. But telling a story is more than what meets the eye. The thing is by telling a story you're not just reciting the facts, because facts alone are hard to memorize and don't make any sense. So telling a story is (the attempt) to make sense (of the facts).
Like a movie is just a series of pictures shown in fast progression. It shows you what the camera saw at a particular point in time and space. So if you throw a dart at a map, go to that place, drop a camera there and just let it roll for idk a random amount of seconds for a random amount of days of raw footage until you've got 90 minutes or whatever is the appropriate length of a movie would that be a story?
Probably not, it's just a series of pictures shown in rapid progression, that you didn't give any meaning to. It makes no sense. And it would probably be puzzling to the viewer why you would have recorded, so to say immortalized, that.
Now despite you not telling a story but just reciting events as they happened, the viewer, confused by what is shown, might try to "make sense of it". So let's say by chance you took pictures of 2 humans first getting their look at things, than again looking at each other, than again holding hands, then again kissing and then just one of them. Or a group of animals that happens to be there when you are there and that just do their thing or maybe just the plants in the background growing, blooming and fading.
These are isolated events, that might even be unrelated to each other, but in our attempt to "make sense" of our environment we'd connect the lines to a story, just like the rapid progression of pictures connects each of these pictures to a continuous flow. So we might call that a tragic love story, a documentary, we might even see it as a metaphor for life itself and expand it beyond what is shown. Maybe we even imagine a meta story of what you as the author of this piece might have been thinking, feeling and experiencing when you made it. We try to make sense of it.
And this flow, that we imagine based on the glimpses of data that we see, that is the story. It's something that helps us to memorize these events, to recite them, to put them into context because now they are no longer random events they are milestones in a journey from a start to an end and so the story becomes drawing by numbers, you know where you're coming from and where you're going to and you can fill the space between in a way that makes sense, but still connects the "plot points".
The facts are so to say the points of progression or change where things happened that change the flow and so that are the parts that become memorable.
So stories are our means to make sense of the world. So religion, science, history, politics and so on. They all try to make sense of what we see and experience and draft stories that try to explain that. And so we create big and small stories, small stories like what happens in every day life, on microscopic scale, in niches where no one is looking, things without impact and big bombastic stories about the universe and everything, about things that are literally much bigger than us, about life, death, creation, destruction, humanity as a whole, the meaning of life and so on.
The problem is, after all these are just stories. They are not necessarily true. Even if the facts themselves are true, the way we connect the facts might be so wrong that the facts themselves no longer are meaningful facts. Imagine I have 3 points positioned in a triangle. Now I connect points A and B (doesn't matter which is which just that they are different) with a straight line and via A to C and C to B. In that case I've have told the story of a cycle, a rough one but one going round from a start back to the start. I also could draw a line right through these points so that the points have the least distance to the line and pretend these are facts suggesting a linear progression from an entirely different point to a yet entirely different point.
So the problem with telling stories is often not that people would ignore the facts, it's that different stories consider different facts to be relevant or irrelevant to the story. Because their importance relies on whether they change the progression of the flow or whether they just follow it.
And so the "grand narratives" that explain the big important events that include all of us and influence all of us are pretty damn dangerous as the 20th century has shown (probably happened before but older story tellers might not have considered that relevant). Like ideas of progressing from the rule of the many to the rule of the few by ways of material improvement or the general idea of progression towards a goal, took a hard fall with WWII and the atomic bomb.
Like there were a lot of great and contradicting narratives and they met each other in genocides and carnage and massive graveyards that didn't care about any story and reduced humanity itself to irrelevance. Promises of progress ended in dystopian nightmares of totalitarian system and the A-Bomb hinted at "The End" of any story. So people had to face the uncomfortable truth that they might actually be wrong and that the grand narratives that ignore the inherent contradictions as insignificant to the larger story until they become significant (such as in massive destruction). Might actually be very problematic as we might not be able to ditch them in case they are wrong and that we might start with smaller stories and closer observations of facts being in conflict with them.
