The Internet is Killing Storytelling, but Photos are Bringing it Back | Hacker News Reader

The Internet is Killing Storytelling, but Photos are Bringing it Back

thedailymuse.com

19 pointsacav7 comments

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

i suspect it's a rhetorical question, but the reason for the fixation, and the reason for mentioning pinterest, is likely just money. it's a business. someone has a deadline. someone else wrote a press release. and then some idiot on hn voted it up...

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.

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