How to tell stories in the digital age

I've long been meaning to write about the future of storytelling. At Hyper we've done some work on a famous BBC drama brand which looked at how to tell stories in a digital culture.

But today I came across this talk which does a great job and inspired me to write this post.

It's clear that the future of storytelling will be less linear and more collaborative than the books and films we take as standard now. Everything in the information age is becoming less linear and more collaborative.

But when considered alongside music 'piracy' and a decline in TV ad revenues, there's a lot of fear about the value of storytelling in the digital age and whether anyone will be able to afford to invest in high quality production. Will the combination of the internet and digital media production mean that everyone will produce content for free but no one will be able to produce professional content? 

Lance Weiler talks a good stance on this in his talk. He takes it as given that content is decreasing in value. And therefore asks what is the value proposition to come. And given the collaborative nature of the coming age, he talks about storytelling as service related rather than production related.

He also talks about the fluid nature of digital information and the need to tell stories that evolve through people's networks on their terms. Something I've discussed here before. And along the same theme, he talks about how he constructs stories against three audience types: watchers, players and agents (people that are involved enough to affect the direction of the story).

When discussing what might happen to storytelling in digital media with another Hyper client recently, I talked about campfires. Before recorded media, stories were told around campfires. They adjusted to their audience and they evolved over time as they moved from campfire to campfire via many storytellers.

Storytelling in a digital age seems to be moving towards a similar power structure - the story spreads itself and moulds around its audience. This contrasts to film production where one central producer retains control of the storytelling process until the end of the film viewing. The difference from the campfire age being that different media available to the teller (film, image and text, as well as the traditional audio) and the size of his audience (global population, perhaps).

So rather than theorise anymore, here are some brilliant examples from around the connected campfire:

We Tell Stories

An investigation into storytelling by Penguin which involved six different authors telling six stories over six weeks. The formats varied from writing stories live to using a map as the format to read from. 

http://wetellstories.co.uk/

 

Good Radio Club

Using Twitter to have an open discussion about a live radio programme as it plays.

http://goodradioclub.co.uk/

 

Loose Fish

A project to adapt classic works of literature for digital age. This is a personal project of someone experimenting with storytelling on the web and trying to find a method that fits the way people use the web. 

http://www.loose-fish.com


This project includes:

The Good Captain

An adaptation of Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno. Since the story is told in the first person, it was well suited to Twitter. Once told on Twitter, the story was republished in book format, available as a download or printed.

 http://www.loose-fish.com/waifpole/the-good-captain/

 

Spoon River Metblog

A modernization of the poetry serial Spoon River Anthology written and published in the form of a fictional local city blog and hosted amongst non-fictional city blogs in the Metroblog syndicate.

http://spoonriver.metblogs.com/

The next Loose Fish project will be a contemporary version of Pride and Prejudice told using Facebook, Twitter and web services.

 

Tube Gossip

A collection of comments overheard on the London Tube.

http://www.themanwhofellasleep.com/gossip.html

 

SXStarwars

The public reenactment of scenes from Star Wars on Twitter started with just a few friends playing Star Wars characters and by the time they’d finished just minutes later, so many people were involved that the production carried on with new participants taking on parts. 

http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/index.php/2009/03/18/twitter-trench-run/

 

Noone Belongs Here More Than You

A website promoting a novel which shows the author learning to make the website as she goes along. 

http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/

 

I Love Bees

From the very simple to the more complex, I Love Bees was a campaign to promote Halo 2, a blockbuster computer game. It took the format of an ARG (alternate reality game). ARGs are collaborative games or narratives where the story exists on many platforms in the real and virtual world at once and is non-linear. Think of the most complex treasure hunt possible and you’re in the right area. For instance, a participant might have to call a phone box to find a code to type into a website to get the next clue. Participants share their clues online to try and solve the puzzle collaboratively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_love_bees

http://ilovebees.com/

  

Lonely Girl 15

The show focuses on the life of a fictional teenage girl named Bree, whose YouTube username is the eponymous "lonelygirl15", but the show does not reveal its fictional nature to its audience. After the fictional status of the show was revealed in September 2006, the show gradually evolved into a multi-character show including both character videoblogs and action sequences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonely_Girl_15

http://www.youtube.com/user/lonelygirl15