The modern serialised story
Serialised narrative fiction as a concept originated to a great extent from Charles Dickens’s publication and subsequent popularity of The Pickwick Papers in such a form. Dickens also popularised the idea of a cliffhanger, even though the term cliffhanger itself originates from one of Thomas Hardy’s novels, also published in serialised form. We see the legacy of this form of story-telling all over modern day television and other forms of media — most TV shows are some form of serialized storytelling, as opposed to the more monolithic idea of a film (the distinction might be blurred today because of the MCU), and cliffhangers are widespread in all of this. The ending of almost every season of Sherlock being an example that comes to mind immediately.
However, I can’t and won’t discuss literary theory here. I want to discuss a form of unintentional serialised storytelling in the modern day — the news.
Now clearly the news isn’t narrative fiction because even in today’s post-truth fake news dominated world one assumes that news from reputable news sources is actually true and therefore cannot be classified as being fiction. Still, there are similarities between the two.
To take a concrete example, consider the Mueller investigation into allegations of collusion into the 2016 US Presidential Election. There are other examples, of course, like the controversy surrounding the purchase of Rafale jets by the Indian government, Brexit and all associated shenanigans, the Huawei arrest and so on, but this takes the cake because of the sheer length of time that news regarding the investigation keeps coming out.
Ozy Media has this email newsletter that they send every evening, India time, as a primer on several major news stories from around the world. Even considering the US bias in the news (understandable. Ozy Media is based in Mountain View, California) these are some of the email subjects from the past few days — ‘Mueller Says Manafort Lied’ (November 27), ‘Mueller: No Jail for Flynn’ (December 5), ‘Cohen Filings Implicate Trump’ (December 8) and today’s (December 14) ‘Reports: Feds Probe Trump Donations’. Even apart from this, almost every email and almost every piece of news related to the Trump administration mentions the ongoing investigations. Newsletters from Wired have run several stories on Mueller and the investigations, and one fine day a special ‘Wired Mueller Report’ landed up in my email inbox. Not that this is the only story — Brexit catches a lot of eyeballs and journalistic ink too and is a story that has picked up the pace in the last few days.
I am but a college student from India, and even though I might land up in the States for some of my studies, the result of the Mueller investigation will not hold too much significance for me. Indians’ entry into the US is not banned for now. Some of Trump’s policies have adversely impacted international students in the US, but even counting the very interconnected nature of today’s world, I don’t think anything that comes out in the news will impact me much except in very oblique ways. So for me, even though the US and Russia are real countries in the world, Trump and Mueller real people and the ’16 Presidential Election a real thing, I can watch the whole saga unfold from a distance with as much emotional involvement as what I would put into a good fiction story.
A good fiction story, yes, because this has been a good story! The initial allegations came in days after the election (some concerns were raised even before and during the election), and like an Agatha Christie novel, the plot has developed in a slow, serpentine manner when even an Indian sitting halfway around the world has back-stories on all the significant people in the story. Almost every day has some new development, and for someone following the whole thing, it might as well be a cliffhanger at the end of an episode. There’s even an old guy filling the role of a detective, and several characters on whom suspicion falls at various points of time.
There’s another reason why news works well as stories. Research in psychology shows that variable interval reinforcement is more effective in learning than fixed interval reinforcement. Put in more straightforward language, consider a scenario where rewards will be used to make a group of people learn a task and two models of the reward. In one model, the reward is given after regular intervals of time, and in another, the reward comes after irregular intervals. It has been shown that learning is faster in the second case. Looking at our example, most serialized stories like TV show episodes happen after fixed time intervals, or under an unspoken guarantee that the show will return after a year or so. News doesn’t work that way, so we never know when the next chapter in a long-running story will come out, and therefore we are always eagerly in wait for the next instalment.
Modern media is an interesting beast. I plan to write more about some of my thoughts on the topic soon (note that there’s no due date on it. More variable interval reinforcement).
