
What's the Best Medium for a Storyteller in 2015 and Beyond? - T-A
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/06/hugh-hancock-here-again-charli.html
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colechristensen
I spent most of my time reading this being annoyed by the title. Why does the
best medium for a storyteller have anything to do with how profitable it is or
how many consumers access your work? If these are your goals then you aren't
going to create anything very good. If you disagree then you probably think
that only very popular things are any good.

Here's the future of any story teller: smaller.

The 20th century was about Top 40 radio, blockbuster movies, and the New York
Times bestseller list. The 21st century is about variety. The behemoths of the
last century are still shaping the marketplace and it will take them a while
to die. DRM, region-lock, and vendor-log are symptoms of this disease. The
future is about unrestricted sharing, crowd-funding, DRM-free and _low cost_
media. A dollar here and there so everything is an impulse – small communities
sharing the things they love instead of national best sellers.

Vimeo does a pretty good job. Netflix is more of an iteration on the last
century, it's pretty great, but not the end-all.

The future of creativity is about dealing with the lack of limits. Old
microphones, amplifiers, and vinyl meant that with the restrictions of the
media, what you had either sounded good or really terrible. New technology
makes it really easy to be mediocre and terrible at the same time – being good
without the restrictions of old is really hard.

The future of selling is about the slow exit of capitalism – crowd funding,
open source, community support ... being creative without worrying about sales
or buying your next meal ... this is the future which is hard to get to but
the beginning is here. This is not Carl Marx's communism but a different sort
of post-scarcity capitalism where automation makes resources cheap enough that
the cost of them loses importance. It'll be difficult and weird, but it'll
happen one way or the other.

Then again, none of this has a whole lot to do with actually telling stories,
something which isn't about money or viewers, but about the act of creation
which is still done with words and songs and pictures, new technology is a new
playground that doesn't obsolete the old but adds to the new.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
I guess some people want to be story tellers and some people want to have been
a story teller.

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Vaskivo
(The post goes on in exploring the technical and commercial side of each
medium. I think the title is unsuitable to the article but, as it was what
stuck with me, it's what I'm going to address)

I think this is a non-question. Let me rephrase the question: "If I want to
tell a story, what is the best medium to use in 2015 and beyond?".

My answer is "Whatever you want" followed by a more serious "None".

Because the choice of medium impacts in HOW the story is told. Having, for
example, the Moby Dick _story_ as a book is completely different from having
it as a movie. Or as a game.

Of course the story may change slightly or have a different impact depending
of the medium. Some stories work better in some media than others. Think of
the story as data, and the medium as the format in which the medium is
conveyed.

In a semi-related note, I want note that the big _connoisseurs_ of a medium
start to focum more on how the medium is used than it's content (i.e. story
stops being important, what's important is how it is told)

~~~
chazu
I'll also add that the vast majority of creative people don't choose their
medium based on its potential reach - they choose it based on where their
passions lie. In order to make great art, an artist has to be passionate about
the medium.

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vkb
Based on what I read of the article (about 2/3), it seems like the question
this article is answering is, "In which entertainment medium can you make the
most money in a least-hard way? "

The best medium for a storyteller will be, as others have said upthread,
whatever they want to use. I am a writer in my non-work world. I have played
around with podcasting, vlogging, blogging, and comics, but the best way for
me to tell a story is through words, no matter how hard it is to distribute
those words. I was writing even before Amazon KDP democratized that medium,
and I will be writing even if it becomes hard again, because I love to write
and I get the most joy out of storytelling that way. I think there are some
people who are medium-agnostic, but most are not.

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storybeagle
The best medium is not where everyone else is already doing it. It is finding
somewhere with enough foundation to build on, but who's value is underrated
and who's opportunities are being ignored. There's an obvious candidate in
storytelling.

Audio.

As it was in the beginning of storytelling, so it should be again. There's a
market for audiobooks, but they are audio books (somewhat like having audio
food, or visual music). Radio drama has sunk, exclude holdouts like the BBC's
Radio 4 in the UK. Podcasts never quite died, despite predictions.

Feels like an area that is just crying out for innovation and renaissance.

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arxpoetica
I've written thoughts on this before, and concluded that it's not just any one
thing, but a never-ending evolution of media based on a new medium:
[https://medium.com/@arxpoetica/a-new-
mythology-6ab0aaad0f37](https://medium.com/@arxpoetica/a-new-
mythology-6ab0aaad0f37)

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Zigurd
Take a look at Starship Titanic. Very ambitious attempt for a writer to make a
game/story/interactive-thing.

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new_hackers
A pan flute

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ralank
narrable is a cool product in the space

