Visual storytelling on phlow
The basic human desire of a good story
Throughout the world, hundreds of millions of people’s attention is focused on the strange sequences of mental images that we call a story. We spend a fantastic amount of our lives, devoting unmeasurable physical and mental resources to stories: telling them; listening to them; reading them; watching them on TV, in films or on stage. Whether fictional through novels, plays, films, comic books or soaps; or factual through newspapers, blogs and news channels — stories are one of the most important aspects of our everyday life. Even the events that happen to you today will be retold as a story in the days, weeks and years to come.
Storytelling is an extension of our ability to imagine. If someone says to us “a unicorn” or “a racing car” or “your front door” somewhere in our heads the words trigger a mental picture of each of these things.
In one of my previous articles on an image being the equivalent to 60k words, I touched on the fact that a new born baby will recognise the image of their mother, long before they understand the term “mummy”. This is because our brains recognise and understand images instantly as one of our cognitive functions, but we have to work to process and translate the text into the imagery form that our brain understands naturally.
Such is the power of this cognitive function and ability to easy process imagery, that visual storytelling with photos or in films, provides far more information in a far shorter period of time than either written or verbal storytelling.
storytelling trend of social media
With this in mind, it is no surprise there has been a trend in the last couple of years towards visual media with social networks and more recently introducing story like features to their platforms. Rather than a single snapshot of a particular moment in time; users are being encouraged to share collections of these to create a story of their day or from a particular event. Facebook Timeline… Snapchat stories… Instagram stories… and just in the last week Twitter moments has been released to the masses.
“The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.”
–Henri Cartier-Bresson, 20th century French photographer
I like this quote from Mr Cartier-Bresson. To me it sums up the reasoning behind the efforts to feed our basic human need for the story, providing our friends with he methods of sharing the stories of their life with us.
Visual storytelling on phlow
phlow also has this concept of visual storytelling. However this is not a feature that we have simply bolted on to our existing platform, the very foundations of phlow itself have been built around this concept.
There is a difference however. Instead of presenting us with the stories of our friends lives — phlow is more personal. phlow tells the stories of the events, interests and topics that you as an individual are most passionate about. phlow places you at the centre of the world and lets you see the stories you want to see.
It provides us with beautiful collections of relevant and related images. Mini stories we can consume anytime, anywhere about the things we are passionate about. We are able to lose our self for a brief moment while on the train, a taxi, the dentist’s waiting room… as we phlow through content that actually means something to us.
