The Future of Storytelling: Socially-Enabled

We hear a lot about digital storytelling as the next wave in the evolution of online activity. Storytelling is seen as the way to break through with your readers, activating them to become customers, fans, even evangelists for you and your products. But, it serves more practical purpose too. Today’s data glut will probably continue growing quickly. Users will increasingly need help contextualizing all this information. Narrative will be the key.

As the information piles up, it will become less and less plausible for us to digest it all. But, the more information we see, the more unquenchable our thirst becomes. And, the greater our shame and guilt at leaving our heaping plates uncleaned.

Missing something important has become one of our greatest fears, even as we recognize the impossibility of the task set before us. It is a tension we all have to come to terms with.

Anthony Townsend at The Institute for the Future recently wrote a series of compelling blog posts on the future of social networking being narrative driven. Here is the crux:

What’s intrigued me about web publishing, since long before it was called blogging, is the empowerment of the author to assemble information into a unique point of view. Maybe its because I fancy myself a writer, but I think the web empowers everyone in that way. The excitement around video today is an amplification and extension of that empowerment to new media. But its still storytelling.

So, this half-baked thought experiment leads me somewhere, I’m gonna throw something out there and see if it sticks. My forecast is – social networks and the real-time web are either a) going to morph into storytelling media that provide tools to construct narrative on top of the update stream, or b) are going to stop growing as people seek out a different set of tools that are better for communication and storytelling than social networks, which do a mediocre job at both. (italics mine)

Location-based apps are some of the important tools that can be used to construct these rolling narratives. As we jump from story to story, tweet to tweet, and place to place, we don’t have the ability to tie everything together. Look back across the last week; you’ll find a jumble of conversations, thoughts, ideas, blog posts, business innovations. But try to dig down deeper and unless you’re Samuel Pepys, good luck accessing them in a helpful way.

Townsend again:

Let’s start with location-based applications. Foursquare, which allows people to clock their visits to virtually any public or semi-public venue is starting to layer storytelling capabilities through the use of tip lists and badges that are awarded as placeholders for past behaviors. Combined with public displays of users’ check-in histories, these actively and passively user-created markers provide the first elements of a story – stories about me, stories about my neighborhood, stories “about last night”.

As we mix our location into the recorded stream, we can go back and access the people we were meeting with, the places we visited. As Townsend says, this the first layer of storytelling. Will you a remember a specific conversation you had last week? No, probably not. But if you can add in where that conversation took place, and with who, and at what time, (all things enabled by services like Foursquare) then the fog begins to lift.

Not only does it make recollection easier, but you can begin to parse together the wisdom gleaned from the experience. “Ah yes, my friend and I were at that Think Coffee on the Bowery talking about new bands when X walked in and joined us. And I have to follow up with him about those bands I wanted to check out.” Now, because the basic elements of a story are in place, the time of day, the place, the people we were with, we can contextualize a portion of that data.

These are only the first steps of socially-enabled storytelling. Certainly new tools will need to be developed before we can create the kind of rich tapestries that we’ll need to make sense of our lives. The stories of our lives are about to be remade. We are about to be activated to get so much more out of our lives. What will we do with this new found depth and insight into our own experiences?

Image Source: paintMonkey on Flickr