Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

From The Times
November 5, 2009


The internet is killing storytelling
Narratives are a staple of every culture the world over. They are disappearing in an online blizzard of tiny bytes of information

Ben Macintyre

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.

The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing.

It was inevitable that more than a decade of digital reading would change the way we do it. In a remarkable recent essay in the Atlantic Monthly Nicholas Carr admitted that he can no longer immerse himself in substantial books and longer articles in the way he once did. “What the net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swift-moving stream of particles.”

If the culprit is obvious, so is the primary victim of this radically reduced attention span: the narrative, the long-form story, the tale. Like some endangered species, the story now needs defending from the threat of extinction in a radically changed and inhospitable digital environment.

Last year Hollywood veterans and scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology teamed up to create a laboratory aimed at protecting the traditional tale from oblivion: the Centre for Future Storytelling. However ludicrous that may sound, they have a point. Storytelling is the bedrock of civilisation. From the moment we become aware of others, we demand to be told stories that allow us to make sense of the world, to inhabit the mind of someone else. In old age we tell stories to make small museums of memory. It matters not whether the stories are true or imaginary.

The narrative, whether oral or written, is a staple of every culture the world over. But stories demand time and concentration; the narrative does not simply transmit information, but invites the reader or listener to witness the unfolding of events.

Stories introduce us to situations, people and dilemmas beyond our experience, in a way that is contemplative and gradual: it is the oldest and best form of virtual reality.

The internet, while it communicates so much information so very effectively, does not really “do” narrative. The blog is a soap box, not a story. Facebook is a place for tell-tales perhaps, but not for telling tales. The long-form narrative still does sit easily on the screen, although the e-reader is slowly edging into the mainstream. Very few stories of more than 1,000 words achieve viral status on the internet.

Meanwhile, a generation is tuned, increasingly and sometimes exclusively, to the cacophony of interactive chatter and noise, exciting and fast moving but plethoric and ephemeral. The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative. The consequence is an anorexic form of culture.

Plot lies at the heart of great narrative: but today, we are in danger of losing the plot. Paradoxically, there has never been a greater hunger for narrative, for stories that give shape and meaning to experience. Barack Obama was elected, in large measure, on the basis of his story, the extraordinary odyssey that begins in Hawaii and ends in the White House, taking in Chicago and Kenya along the way.

The news stories that compel us are not the blunt shards of information, but those with narrative: the tragic mystery of Madeleine McCann; the enraging saga of parliamentary scandal; the strange decay of Gordon Brown’s premiership. Reality television, The X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing, all are driven by personal narratives as much as individual talent.

Our fascination with other people’s stories is as great, if not greater, than any time in history. This year I am judging the Costa biography of the year award. The astonishing range of biographical writing is testament to our appetite for narrative. Reading several dozen lives, one after the other, has been fascinating, but also unfamiliar, and exhausting. Like Carr and, I suspect, many others, I too have become used to absorbing lives in Wikipedia-shaped chunks.

What is needed is a machine that can combine the ease and speed of digital technology with the immersive pleasures of narrative. It may not be far off. Japan has recently seen an explosion in the popularity of thumb novels, keitai shosetsu, book-length sagas that can be uploaded to the screen of your mobile phone, one page at a time.

These mobile telephone tales are written in the language of the net: scraps of text-speak, slang and emoticons, but these are still unmistakably narratives, stories with a protagonist, a beginning and an end. They are also hugely popular: sales of books in Japan are dropping, but half the Top Ten fiction bestsellers started on mobile telephones. Here is proof that the ancient need for narrative, hardwired into human nature, can sit comfortably with the wiring of the newest technology.

Narrative is not dead, merely obscured by a blizzard of byte-sized information. A story, God knows, is still the most powerful way to understand. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word, in the great narrative that is the Bible, was not written as twitter.

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

I don't think so, I think it is just demanding that the story be better…*

what I mean by that, is that all the unecessary things need to be eliminated…they are distracting and don't serve the plot…

I too have found myself impatient with stories or blogs where it is obvious the writer is trying to impress you with their massive intelligence…while that might hold some that are just over-the-top for words…most are still drawn in by the simple yet profound truth of the story…the authentic voice of the writer is what holds the attention of the masses…and the internet is just demanding that from us…that we become more authentic, and that what we write is not destracting by unnecessary info…

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

Dear Bruce, I enjoyed that look at collective and my own mind as it is being influenced by this modern version of “thought as a system” (Bohm) that we call the internet. 
   But I think you are right in saying it is probably a phase. Newbies to anything tend to be fanatical and try to take in too much too fast. In my past career as a psychological service provider in state institutions, I encountered a prison inmate who had been diagnosed as bipolar, manic phase. In reality, he had just converted to a religion (Christianity) and was so excited about it that he was indiscriminately “preaching” all over the place, any time, to any one. He was turning more prisoners off to Christianity than he was turning them on to it. Over a small time, he seemed to begin to realize that, made some effort to cool it, mature in his faith, to pace himself in his faith, and to adopt more socially appropriate ways that were more effective for ministering. I am sketchy as to whether he ever took meds. I don't think he did. The “narrative”, as I recall, in the Mental Health Department in that prison was that he got better spontaniously - spontaneous remission. Of course, a die-hard psychopathologist would say he “cycled out” of the manic phase, but I am convinced that it was what is called an “adjustment disorder”, which happened to have manic affective features. He had an assimilation issue with his born again conversion. Same could apply on a larger scale with the internet and related peer-to-peer forums. Everyone could be shouting from the mountaintops, all a twitter with twittering! And, like my so-called manic prisoner, saying not much of anything substantial, and certainly not sustainable in terms of meaningful communication. In time, the new will wear off, and we will learn to wear our new process in a way that fits the human soul much better. As you pointed out, narrative is already emerging midst the craziness of the process. The process of communication  (zone 7) will evolve in time, and with it, zone 3, shared meanings, the feel of a we, will reap new fruits, because the narrative will have more ways to be heard. 
      Regarding the story, or narrative, as a “door” to wholeness or spirituality, the following link has some of my own journal entries that seem to fit into the “journey”, the “narrative”. I combined “journey and flow”. Proabably should have kept them seperated, but the reader can get the gist, or “flow” of the journey nonetheless. Here is the link to a section within The Marketing of Virtue: Allsberg Rising (chapter 4, The Master Tool, Doors: Door of the Journey and Flow


darrell

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

THX the net you are not any longer subject to one- sided exploitation and torturing tales written by some madmen and their pychotic like mythologies, style: silly Mein kampf or a long list of colonial bullshit by mediocres like Houston Chamberlain, Rudyard Kipling or Cecil Rhodes, etc.. a long list following, please flush behind you.
:-(

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

Xibalba, Good point. The internet seems perfect for postmodern deconstruction of the old institutional forms which could be driven, on occassion, by dictators and madmen. While it leaves us in an ash-heap of relativity, it sets up the rising of a Phenox which is integrated at a deeper level than previously. Once the (indiviual or collective) mind learns to walk around itself - taking many more perspectives than it did when it was caught up in its own projections, unaware of that those thoughts were projections - then it can go back into itself with more awareness than it had before it astrally projected. Outside looking in becomes integrated with inside moving out. Mind becomes aware of its simulanious breadth and depth. 
   Deep and Wide, Deep and Wide, there's a fountain flowing, deep and wide. I recall those lines from bible school - the most profound part of my religious upbringing came from those lines, and from a song about letting your little light shine. The dynamics of spirituality are often overlooked by the religious content, or dogma. If we can master those two simple bible school songs, we will have graduated from a super advanced seminary or ashram, IMO. This is what I mean by “thinking like energy” -  metaphorically, not literally, as in confusing Wilber's UR view with an UL view. But taking the phenomenal qualities of “energy” and thinking like that - more dynamically and “interpenetratingly”.
   Darrell

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

I think the author is lamenting our embodied movement in the world further away from depth, much the way David Abram was pointing out in his book, “The Spell of the Sensuous”.  

Somewhere on line he describes his 'Deep Ecology' as a response to ”a nature that we are not a part of but that we look at from outside – like a God, or like a person staring at a computer screen.”  He says, ”such cool, disembodied detachment is itself an illusion, and a primary cause of our destructive relation to the land.”   

He suggests in his book that our task with language should return to…    

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

that makes a lot of sense David…i wasn't thinking of it in that way…thnx for the opening…*

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

David and Starlight, Perhaps one function of this internet thing could be to help form actual, embodied, communities which incorporate the best of the new (postmodern, relativistic, multiperspective) thought and old. I devoted a lot of time to dreaming up such a place. I am now using the internet to both shamelessly and honorably plug what I think to be a good idea. The below links introduce the concept and story of “Allsberg”:Introduction,Chapter 1.

Darrell

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

Hey Darrell, I will try and check this out when I can…thnx for posting it*

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

I relate to what the author says about attention span – I don't think I've finished reading a book, cover to cover, in about two years now.  I only read small chunks, in no special order, similar to how I read on the internet.  I hadn't attributed this directly to the influence of the internet, but it seems likely that my daily internet habits have shortened my attention span.  I definitely feel a difference in my reading patterns from several years ago.  I jump around a lot more, often skimming many things at once, seldom settling for long into any one thing.  Part of this probably has to do with a busy schedule – with not having long chunks of time to do what I want.  But part of it probably is a result of this new medium, too.  I find myself getting impatient with lengthy books.  I don't look at this as the fault of books (containing unnecessary information), but as a 'loss' on my part.

But more to the subject of this thread (and the Times article above):  while the net, right now, is not the place I would go to if I wanted to immerse myself in a good story, I'm less interested in the question of whether the net is 'killing' storytelling, and more interested in asking, What can the internet do for storytelling?  While a lot of focus is on everyday 'chatter' and on-the-fly 'information picking,' I think there's potential on the net for communicating in ways that help create an enlarged sense of place, a deeper sense of engagement.  I'm thinking here, in part, of the distinctions between modes of 'virtual reality' (VR-1 vs. VR-2) that Ron Purser, Char Davies, and others discuss (see related blog) – not necessarily using virtual technology, but using technology to encourage fuller modes of participatory engagement.

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

dang Bruce you just described me, but when i reflected a while back on why something was unable to hold my focus vs. something that was, it had more to do with how that content was being presented, as i clarified in my first post on this thread…so in a way, the fast pace of the internet might just be encouraging us to become more focused with our authentic voice…so maybe it's a good thing…

the authenticity of the intention or heart of the story is lost in myriad words void of connected meaning…imm…(which connects to where David was pointing)*

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

I have stopped reading books too. I once devoured books, more than one a day sometimes. The internet has changed us, changed us irrevocably.

We cannot return to that pre-internet simplicity. We can only move forward, find a new balance perhaps.

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

Hey Nic, it depends on the book in my case…I don't have patience for books that are not written well, say the same thing over and over, or fail to make their point without losing it first…

So, maybe I have not really been influenced by the internet per say, b/c I have always been that way…the message has to appeal to my sense of importance as well, if it doesn't, it will not hold my attention…same thing with reading posts…If they start going off focus, or if the focus is ridiculous in my mind, or if they don't draw me in almost immediately, I just cannot read it…my brain freaks out at what it considers to be nonsense or fluffy content with no real substance…especially if it is not written well, and someone writes a small book on one post that goes round in circles…geeze…my mind cannot handle that…better that it is short and simple and to the point for me…or, if it is long and drawn out, it has to really have some fire in it to hold my attention…

So maybe, I don't think that the Internet is killing storytelling for me…I think it just depends on the story teller and how the story is told…

much love and joy Nic…always, *

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

I used to read every book I began from beginning to end, but years before the internet learned to put down those that were rubbish. 

Love you always, too!

Nicole

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

I dunno Bruce…I read all the TSK books…lol…some I enjoyed more than others, and some parts of them more than other parts, but I forced myself through what was difficult for me…now the exercises, that was a whole other thing for me…I have my own exercises…lol*

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

I've never been one to indulge in much story telling, perhaps because, like Star, I get impatient with fluff, but if I come across something that I think I might find interesting and edyfying, I will read it, which is what I did this summer for the first time in a long time, and that was to read the book The Sea the Sea, by Iris Murdoch, which I digested very slowly over the course of the entire summer, reading it only when I was on the beach, while offering my body to the sun goddess, who kissed my skin gently with her rays, as she slowly browned me to a deep bronze. :-) 

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

i was was the sun goddess?  lmao*

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

I still love a well-told story, but also find myself reading them (or listening to / watching them in film version) less frequently, in part because I've beeb more easily distracted by online engagement during the past 5 years or so. It's true also that I've become more “picky” about stories, more discriminating about what activities I'm willing to invest my time in. Perhaps that's just part of my aging process – as I sense that I've got less lifetime left, I'm less willing to waste it on stories that are just so-so. I appreciate simplicity and depth, insight and humility, spiciness and humor … and writers that have a way with the flow and sound and textures of words (thanks for that excerpt from Abram, Davidu). I savor stories that take off and gallop in some way,  books that grab/drag / pull me out of my daily routine, tempting me to drop everything until they are through with me. And it just seems that there are fewer of them these days!

A confession: the last couple of stories that grabbed me that way were Stephanie Myer's Twilight, the teenage vampire romance (the first book in a series of four), and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. Some of the best (recent) stories, imo, are in books marketed to young adults.

Bruce, you wrote:

I think there's potential on the net for communicating in ways that help create an enlarged sense of place, a deeper sense of engagement.  I'm thinking here, in part, of the distinctions between modes of 'virtual reality' (VR-1 vs. VR-2) that Ron Purser, Char Davies, and others discuss (see related blog) – not necessarily using virtual technology, but using technology to encourage fuller modes of participatory engagement.

I'll check this out & ponder it a bit … I would love it if the net could foster deeper engagement and an enlarged sense of place. My experience of cyberspace is mixed – a kind of love-hate relationship. I've met people and formed friendships that would probably never have occurred in the time before Cyberia. I, and many others I know, have ended up connecting and working with people in physical space after first meeting and sharing ideas through an online forum. As wonderful as that can be, it also leaves me with a kind of “communal yearning” that is never satisfied – an odd loneliness that cannot be quelled by online interaction. I long to be “in real time and space” with friends I've gotten to meet and spend time with because of online interaction. I know this isn't true for everyone, though –it could just be my personal quirk, and there are plenty of people who are perfectly fine with just the online gabbing and sharing and creating – and who perhaps even prefer it to face-to-face engagement. But for me, so far, the “story” and “space” we create in Cyberia feels somewhat “unconsummated” or incomplete without the kind of social bonding that takes place in physical meetspace.

Cheers,
Mary

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

M~As wonderful as that can be, it also leaves me with a kind of “communal yearning” that is never satisfied – an odd loneliness that cannot be quelled by online interaction. I long to be “in real time and space” with friends I've gotten to meet and spend time with because of online interaction. I know this isn't true for everyone, though –it could just be my personal quirk, and there are plenty of people who are perfectly fine with just the online gabbing and sharing and creating – and who perhaps even prefer it to face-to-face engagement. But for me, so far, the “story” and “space” we create in Cyberia feels somewhat “unconsummated” or incomplete without the kind of social bonding that takes place in physical meetspace.



Hey Mary…I feel this way too…like I have invested in relationships that will never really flourish past a certain cyberspace…gol…

Re: Is the Internet Killing Storytelling?

I can go with many of the statements in this thread… it can be hard to “go back” to reading books when you can seemingly 'have it all under your fingertips' in the online world. But that's not true, and some topics still require time for study and the context of an argument that builds up over several chapters.
of course life is too short for stupid and lame books, so don't be afraid to dump them… I for my part find that to really concentrate on reading, I have to have free time, and no pressure of any sorts… same is true for writing books, probably… today I managed to go back to reading and it feels pretty good actually.
For me online interaction is a good thing, because sometimes its hard to find people to share this kind of special interest in e.g. postmetaphysical spirituality.. and to be honest, I don't have to necessarily meet anybody of you in person, I mean it would be nice certainly, but I'm also happy as it is now… hehe that's the geek side of me.. and yes I see that pure online communication tends to be superficial and impersonal.. so what? It is what it is… :-)