Storytelling in the Time of the Internet
The conversation between storytellers and their audiences has changed fundamentally and in a way that will likely never be reversed.
It was maybe only a matter of time and sufficient technological advancement. Traditional one-way media had a quasi-monopoly over our eyes and ears for almost a century. Television in particular was conceived quite overtly as a means by which to influence public opinion with the “storytellers” being ambitious politicians and enterprising industrialists. Books — our most enduring delivery system for stories — had their supremacy that is mostly unchallenged when it comes to who controls the narrative. The difference is that the reader’s power was somewhat preserved within the simple economics of supply and demand.
The internet profoundly changed all of that, and perhaps re-coded the very DNA of how storytellers and their audiences interact, bringing the conversation firmly into the realm of the chicken and egg conundrum. The modern question is now “Who is controlling the narrative now?” No one can fully know, but a closer look does reveal a chaotic and ever-shifting dynamic between storytellers and their audiences, where a very cold and predetermined static give-and-take used to exist.
A New Hope was firmly George Walton Lucas Jr.’s story, albeit formulated in the traditional Hero’s Journey structure and vastly derived from themes that had proven successful with audiences in the past. The film sticks to the equation storytelling used to follow; creators observing the ebbs and flows of our interests to craft stories that would compel us to listen and watch them, while we, the audience, would gather and drink it all down in joyful sugary gulps and ask for seconds and thirds. In the case of The Fast and Furious’s- our lips became glued to the soda fountain. That said, Lucas has little sway in what happens with the story these days. Some may go as far as to say that even his direct fans and inheritors can’t keep the tsunami of audience desires at bay when planning the immortal franchise’s future.
The storyteller used to have to listen and study its audience to deliver stories that would resonate, but once the die was cast, the audience had little influence over where it would go. Today we find a much-altered landscape with TV series living and dying by the whims of the online hordes and social media influencers. Stories of cancelled shows, pulled from the brink of oblivion due to grassroots campaigning by its fans were things of curiosity in the past. Today, we see entire AAA franchises screech to a halt and jettisoned into space for the crime of miscasting a central character or for neglecting some celebrated in-game mechanic from former editions. In some fan fiction cases, the very manifestation of audience participation has managed to rival and outsell the branded story worlds they cropped out of in the first place. The blood is squarely in the water.
The audiences seem to have become supreme dictators in the most extreme cases, but also the storytelling process has become more of a symbiotic relationship akin to Eddie Brock’s affair with a certain sentient interstellar sludge. The fact is: storytellers own the story at the start because they conceive them, but once introduced to the public of social media-driven reality, stories become wild teenagers running gloriously free in a world full of transformative experiences, ever prone to mutation and self-questioning.
The conversation has changed indeed, and any storyteller that wants to make a connection these days has to learn to not only release some of their control to the audience but maintain a constant feedback loop that might ultimately grow it into a living, breathing symbiosis of its own. The question is, how much control does one give the audience versus staying true to a vision, as there are dangers to both paths.
Written by: Jason Ambrus
