What's the Best Medium for a Storyteller in 2015 and Beyond?
antipope.org
antipope.org
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.
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)
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.
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.