Story telling in the age of twitter
June 29, 2009
I have been thinking about how we tell stories as I have some client work to do around building a narrative. We assume that the framework for story telling has stayed the same, the way it has been forever. A beginning, a middle, an end. A sense of drama, something that must be overcome and the climatic solution, the happy or unhappy resolution.
I am wondering about this. At the Gates Foundation, we did some research that said that people want to hear that investing in aid or charity works. They don’t want to hear about all the poverty and sickness. So how do you tell that story, without telling the sad part first. It defies our sense of normal story telling.
Then there is the impact of new news slipping into the narrative all the time. Imagine that you are telling a story about something that happened to you yesterday. Along the way, someone interrupts with something related, and then someone else chimes in with something completely random. That is the media environment today–our narrative’s disrupted by incoming twitters or interruptions of some sort, forever altering the storyline.
And who owns a story? My friend, Rick Smolen of Day in the Life fame, is producing a book that is an Obama time capsule. I say producing because it is a book that anyone can add to, customize with their own art, impressions, etc. Each participant owns their own story. And the collective involvement in this project becomes the story of Obama that we all participate in.
What I am most excited by is this sense that we are all writing and telling stories, each of us adding to other’s narrative. It is messy, but it is collaborative. Like the old phone game, a story is always enhanced as it gets passed along.
