I Am User Generated

The redundant and copious nature of social media stories is obvious even to the most casual social media audience. In an oral tradition stories would have to be repeated in order to reinforce what was just said. There was not the opportunity to flip back a few pages or rewind to regain the thread of a story. Orators would reiterate and reinforce to help their audience to follow the story. Again even with all the powers of the Internet and computers to archive we still have a huge amount of redundancy in our storytelling. YouTube, the most popular of social media video sharing sites, has a copious amount of stories. One of the main keys to YouTube’s success is that next to the current video story that the audience is watching, the audience has a selection of related videos. These related videos add to the redundancy of the story, which adds to ability to remember, which adds to the ability to keep the story alive. In the YouTube world stories are kept alive by posting video responses. This adds again a redundant step but also adds to the interlocution of storytelling that was lost in mono-directional media such as the novel or radio or all high-definition hot media as McLuhan would so label them.