Stories everywhere

I started poking at this idea back in October of 2017, but it wasn’t until earlier this month that a story in The Atlantic helped crystallize things for me.

Over the last year and a bit, it seems that through the move fast and steal… sorry break stuff manner of Facebook, stories as a post format have taken hold in some variously used corners of social media. I don’t use them much other than in Snapchat, where it’s the only format available, but that’s not to say that is the only place we have seen them. Before Social Media as we see it now, the early stages of Web 2.0 had blog posts, and their shorter, more ephemeral asides. There were chapters in books, and the articles that examined them. World events played out on the grand stage and we had books to tell a story in a more manageable manner.

If we proceed through the various formats, from longer to shorter in order, there is a loss in fidelity. Neil Postman talks about this in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (YouTube interview) underscoring that each form of media can only hold so much, or by extension, a certain type of information. So at what point is the format essentially useless? Are these sub ten second clips that last for a day or less truly stories?

I would suggest it would be when there is no longer the ability to reflect on what is presented. But wait you may say. If that is the case, the rich oral history that has supported the stories of humanity for generations isn’t that much different than a Snap/Insta story that only presents itself for a fleeting second. But one has a purpose! Well, they both do. One has power to motivate and recruit people! Ever hear about followers?

So if length and permanence isn’t a means of discriminating between what is a true story or not, what is? I’m thinking that maybe we don’t really need to care as long as there is a defined purpose or context for the message to exist within.

“Story” is a terrible name for this feature, because it’s so broad as to descend into meaninglessness. In ordinary parlance, a story is a generic name for a narrative account of something. But a Story, of the Instagram and Snapchat sort, is something much more specific. It’s a collection of images and short videos, with optional overlays and effects, that a user can add to over time, but which disappears after 24 hours. Users view a Story in sequence, either waiting out a programmed delay between images or manually advancing to the next.

That’s about the most bizarrely precise definition of “story” I’ve ever heard. But even if Stories aren’t really stories, they deserve careful attention, especially given Cox’s warning. Like them or hate them, Stories might be the first true smartphone media format. And that might mean that they will become the dominant format of the future. – The Atlantic

The Atlantic article goes on to say that “smartphone stories” are not really stories, that they should be referred to as narratives. So if they are better thought of as narratives, who is the narrator? In my mind, most of the time I hear that word in my head, I hear the opening scenes of the old Disney Winnie the Pooh episodes and Sebastian Cabot’s voice describing the adventure to come. It would be hard to suggest that the many adventures of a bear with very little brain are not a story.

So it seems that we are splitting hairs when we try to protect in some manner what is and what is not a story based on our existing definitions.

So if we are splitting hairs on an old definition, then maybe we need to look at these image based, phone resident captures of a narrative differently. If we think that a story needs to be a complete document in order to qualify, snaps/’grams and the like are not stories. But if we look at each individual frame as a passage in a work that is indefinite, we may be moving on to something. A digital, visual diary is a useful analogue.

In the past people wrote letters. These were not necessarily belittled because they were too short, or that they didn’t build up to books because they shared the same format as a page in a book. Letters were forms of expression for those who took the time to produce them. Sometimes with more craftsmanship than others. Millions of diaries archived the otherwise unremarkable events of daily life. Sometimes the entries were embellished, other times they were low quality satisfactions of a habit. Few if any of these are reflected on, preserved, or even consumed by those who created them in the first place. Yet, they are an important part of what many people do.

Phone based stories, in my opinion, are just the next iteration of these diaries. For all that they are, or are not, they are a means of expression. Often sharing only the highlights, but sometimes the low points as well. Open in form, nearly endless in length. They deserve exploration, and are a gateway to other forms of expression, just as other formats have in the past. Evaluated on their own merits, they may, one day bring in a completely new form of storytelling that will allow us to better understand ourselves and each other.