
The Internet is Killing Storytelling, but Photos are Bringing it Back - acav
http://www.thedailymuse.com/tech/the-internet-is-killing-storytelling-but-photos-are-bringing-it-back/
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breckinloggins
Nothing has changed. The people who want to tell stories, tell them.

But for all the complaints about short-form internet media like texts and
tumblr, twitter and facebook status updates, at least people are _writing_.
That's a lot more than can be said for the time before all of these things
existed. Before social media, texting, and blogging, you could go weeks or
months without writing a damn thing other than what you had to write for
school or work (which often amounted to nothing at all).

Now we have a way for everyone to discover for themselves whether or not they
are interested in longer-form storytelling. You can't tell me we don't have
many more storytellers telling many more stories today than we did in the time
before writing became something that _suddenly everyone regardless of social
status did for themselves every single day_.

~~~
sliksal02
The problem isn't that people are writing less than before, it's that so many
are doing it so poorly such that we're overwhelmed with information and easily
prone to overlooking the stories that are worth telling and are still being
told. The author alludes to this: if the Federalist Papers were published
today, it would be very easy to dismiss them as tl;dr and move on to the next
update. There's no quality control anymore.

~~~
breckinloggins
The quality control exists, but it's become ad-hoc and decentralized. I think
this will ultimately be a very good thing, though we are still experiencing
severe learning pains.

In many ways, sites like Hacker News and reddit serve as democratized curators
of quality content. If quality content is rewarded with high karma, this
hopefully rewards more people to produce that content.

Even when a site like reddit gets bogged down in the low-form entertainment of
the masses (which, admit it or not, we _all_ comprise at some point in our
days), the site itself forms a "bud" off the main branch with a return to
quality [1].

In the end, I think we're both right. There's more writing than ever before
(good), and there's worse writing than ever before (bad). We as a society must
figure out not only how to do quality control in this new environment, but
also to recognize when we're merely being _snooty_ (in public, while laughing
hilariously at inane facebook updates in private).

[1] see <http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub>

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hcarvalhoalves
I don't know why this fixation with Instagram or Pinterest.

There's nothing new on photos. We're doing this since the 50's. You had 36
exposures per roll to tell a story, then make a photo album or a series of
slides. And you had to make each photo count. Given with Instagram is so easy
to upload a photo, it's actually a bad exercise in storytelling: it's full of
mundane pics of people shooting themselves at the bathroom mirror.

I'm can't reason why Pinterest is in this article either. A big portion of the
content on their site is not original, just products and wishlists.

~~~
batiudrami
I actually find Instagram is the opposite - because every photo shows up as
its own 'story', people use more discretion in what they upload. There are
Facebook albums filled with hundreds of photos of parties and people dressed
up going out, but that's not really what Instragram is about.

YMMV, of course, and as with all social media, depends on the people you
follow.

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ktizo
The internet is not killing storytelling or long form writing, and photos are
not the new storytelling culture.

There is plenty of long form writing on the web, which the people who read
long form writing will happily go and read. And storytelling in all media
forms, from written, to filmed, to animated, to comic strip and illustrated,
etc, is more directly available than ever before.

There is however also another factor at work. More writers. Vastly more
writers. Before the internet, the idea that an average person would spend
their free time by sitting at a keyboard and communicating mostly through the
written word would seem insane.

Look at all the pre-internet sci-fi about communication in the future. Is all
video and voice. Almost no-one predicted a mass attempt at literacy by the
general public.

But it turns out people just like to see their own words out there.

The act of writing is not just about storytelling, it is also about
communication by territorial pissing, and so there are many websites, like
facebook and twitter, that are setup to serve this desire to tag the quick
epithet and leave a mark.

Complaining that there is little long form narrative in these sites is a bit
like wondering why no-one has bothered writing an elaborate dissertation on
the theory of mind, on the side of the local bus station.

