New Media and the Transformation of Storytelling

As the summer draws to its close, and the bean-counters flicker their abaci back and forth to see how successful it has been, we can predict with some confidence that we will be looking at one of two sets of headlines in the coming weeks. Either we will be told that it's been a bonanza year for the movies and everything's fine, or our business is cruising to disaster assailed by competing media on all sides. Not once will they discuss whether the pictures released have been any good or not. That is, of course, beside the point.

So it's interesting to look at this series of interviews about the ways in which new media is transforming story telling, and thus the movies.

The internet has changed beyond question the way in which we consume story. It's thrown everybody's business models up into the air, and no one yet has a clear grasp on its various ramifications — how will we exploit new windows, what kind of revenues will they generate, how do we deal with a generation increasingly inclined to expect entertainment for free, and so on.

Here, though, we're looking at how new media changes the creation of story itself. There are a number of interesting points raised.

The first, by Dean Jansen, is that the internet has changed the economics of story creation. It used to be, he argues, that only a few had the ability to craft stories and to get them out, and that this increased democracy of creation is changing the fundamentals of story-telling.

Certainly, it's democratised distribution. As Francis Coppola famously said about video, the cheapness of video technology would mean that the next great cinematic talent would be probably some kid messing about in the backyard with a camera.

It's also allowed for the creation of more story. Rather than changing the fundamentals, this instead speeds up the evolution of our understanding of visual narrative, of the tricks and short-cuts we can employ while preserving the lucidity of our tale. The fundamentals beneath it all arguably stay the same.

What's really interesting, is this point from Henry Jenkins, who states that each media platform creates its own relationship between the story-teller and the listener. The web opens up a bigger canvas for narrative, one which stretches across existing media.

The ramifications of this are vast. People will still enjoy a linear narrative. We have done since the dawn of our species, so that's something that's unlikely to change in a hurry. But this transmedia platform allows them to explore the deeper world of a story in a different way.

It also allows for increased participation with story, for stories with multiple narrators, for the audience to influence the direction of the story.

This isn't in fact something new. People have always been able to write fan fiction. They've always been able to explore the worlds of the stories they love in other formats (what else is Dungeons and Dragons other than a massive, fan-driven, participatory way to explore the worlds of The Lord of the Rings and its imitators in a paper form?).

There was a huge trend in the 1980's for participatory books where you, the reader, chose the outcome. Should character X do A or B? For A, turn to page 97, and so on.

The new thing is not the concept but its application. The internet provides the means to distribute cheaply. Computing power allows participation to happen instantly in a visual format, and with a potential for innumerable possible outcomes.

Since the movies have been the primary popular narrative mode of the last one hundred years or so, it's difficult sometimes for people to see beyond the constrictions of their linear nature. This leads to a tendency to confuse plot with story.

Story is built from plot, character, genre, point of view and setting, among other things. So when we begin to see a shift in people's relationships to story, it's arguably some kind of renegotiation of how these elements fit together.

Ian Condry points to his research in Japan, saying that the logic of the new media material he's seeing there stems from character and the worlds those characters inhabit. "It's about the way those characters fit together in certain kinds of dramatic premises, and the way they move in certain worlds."

In short, we're looking at the creation of new, well-defined, mythological characters, who are defined by certain traits and skills, and exploring their interaction in a given time and place. It's not unlike Billy Kwan's description of Indonesian shadow puppets in The Year of Living Dangerously, which begins at 2'04" in the clip below:

Nor is it unlike Ancient Greek tragic theatre, which takes the characters and situations of much older myths, and uses them and presents them in new dramatic ways.

In each case, the fundamental, under-pinning logic of story-telling isn't changed. It's the application of that logic, and the consumption and reception of it.

The online and the off-line narrative worlds are going to fuse. Television and the internet will become the same thing, and we do not fully understand how we will use this new integrated medium — just as telecoms companies never anticipated texting. And also just as the Lumière brothers could never have anticipated the studio system, or the pioneers of photography can have realised that their inventions would lead to impressionist painting and its many successors.

Just as cinema didn't kill the theatre, this new transmedia world will not kill linear visual narrative story-telling. But it will profoundly change the way in which the business of its creation and distribution has been constructed in ways we cannot predict.

Hat tip: DealFatigue