I Am User Generated

WHAT

Let’s look for a moment and only a brief moment at the “what” of social media storytelling. What stories are being told within this space? This only warrants a passing glance because ultimately the “what” of storytelling has not changed in centuries. In Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces he outlines the classic mythic forms of storytelling that all stories can be reduced down to. Campbell, whose writings have influenced the greatest modern media story telling, from George Lucas to Stanley Kubrick, charts centuries of literature, film, and poetry and draws parallels between the “what” of every story told from the Christ story, to Buddha, to Osiris, to Promethus to Luke Skywalker. Aristotle’s Poetics from 335 BC explained poetry in a similar way by outlining “first principles” which established storytelling into genres of Tragedy, Comedy and Epic verse. The genres of Aristotle and the myth tales of Campbell have not changed but the mediums have. Through the ages we’ve told the same stories but just in different ways. That being said the medium is not 100% the message as is so often understood from Marshall McLuhan’s pop-culture utterance. Rather, as McLuhan explains in his seminal Playboy interview, that the message is subordinate to medium and that medium has a great influence on the audiences read of the message. For these reasons the emerging language of social media that’s been born by the medium in which social media stories are told will be the focus of this work.

HOW

Historically stories have been told across many different mediums, which have evolved through technological advancement. From the oral tradition of storytelling came the written manuscript. With the advent of the Gutenberg Press these manuscripts could be mass-produced and disseminated to the people. This gave rise to a print and text based culture which McLuhan applies the moniker of the Gutenberg Man to in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Gutenberg Man then started receiving stories through electronic media. This, of course, would be radio, telephones, film and television. The Internet is also in this category of electronic media, but should be separated into Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is seen as an evolution from the initial days of the Internet in that it involves a higher degree of social interaction, participation and collaboration. For the purposes of this paper, the stories that are told within this Web 2.0 space will be referred to as social media stories.Social media is of particular interest not because it is the next evolution of the Internet, but rather because it is more akin to an oral tradition, the birthplace of storytelling. As earlier stated social media is characterized by interaction, participation and collaboration, which is only the beginning of the similarities of oral and social media storytelling. In the following pages these similarities will be further explored against the backdrop of Reverend Walter J. Ong’s definitions of orality with examples from social media stories to support the connection. It is up to us as the individual to wield this power appropriately.In analyzing social media storytelling it is important to compare it against other mediums that have supported storytelling in the past in order to understand its workings and to see if it’s even worth all the press and hype it’s getting. Is Web 2.0 really changing; the media landscape, changing the rules of business and forever altering our culture? Although there is a limited amount of academic research into the emerging field of social media there is much study at the highest level on transitional periods when new forms of technology have changed the way we tell stories. Again if a culture is understood by the stories they tell then it is stories that should be analyzed. Although social media storytelling directly proceeds and has been birthed by a confluence of a technology age with an Internet/computer electronic age these posts will present a case that it owes more in the language of storytelling to an oral tradition. Admittedly, social media stories are told using electronic age and computer age tools such as video, broadband, and html coding, however it is not the interest of this site to compare the tools of storytelling, but rather the form, style, and textual and visual language of the stories being told. The tools are not off interest simply because of cross-platforming. This Web 2.0 buzzword means of course the ability of the story to function across many delivery platforms such as a mobile device (iPod, cellular phone), a blog, a video sharing site (YouTube), an online store (ebay, iTunes), and an online social network (Facebook, Linkedin). To reiterate, the tools are ubiquitous and the message or what of the stories has been the same throughout changes in tools and medium. Over the next few weeks I’ll now turn to the how social media stories are told in a similar language to that of an oral tradition of storytelling.