Storytelling: The transition

The last decade has drastically transformed how people interact and engage with information. From the birth of life-altering mobile applications such as Snapchat to stories across most social media platforms, the globe has surely become a lot smaller than it felt just 20 years ago. What has this meant for storytelling? How has this been influenced by technology, instant connectivity, and overall traditions of telling a story?

Here are a few things we have noticed over the last couple of years:

Storytelling is a sought out skill

Yes, storytellers are some of the most sought talents across the globe today. Why? Businesses today depend on great stories for their product or services to be consumed. The population has had enough sale pitches and want to connect with what they consume, leaving companies in high demand for storytellers to convey the products and services a company wants its target to relate to and purchase. Gone are the days of the best prices and flashy ads? We don’t know for sure, but what is certain is that the playing-field has turned on itself and storytellers are an integral part of the game.

A long story is a boring story

Stories are getting shorter, or rather they get straight to the point pretty quickly. Consider a story length on well-renowned social media apps like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the most influential of them all when it comes to visual storytelling, Tiktok. These snippets of videos uploaded on the internet are a mere 15 to 60 seconds long, leaving no room to dally on anything you have to say unless you want a part 2, 3 and so forth to your “story”. It has been a remarkable journey discovering what people can do in these short periods, but it has meant that shorter stories are now generally preferred to the traditional long storytelling process, like that of theatre, documentaries and the good, old fashion flipping of papers of your favourite book.

Lessons are fleeting from our stories

Because of the short time you have to make a story, a lot of the traditional lessons learnt in a more detailed story are slowly starting to be left out. Where stories could incorporate more than one story or life lesson as before because storytelling could be more elaborated, storytellers have had to limit the number of activities in their short stories to make them easier to follow and have meaning to their consumers.

The impact on creativity

This is a tough one. On one hand, we have seen that stories are becoming more of the same thing repeated over and over again. A perfect example of this is challenges online, where dance or activity is repeated many times my different storytellers and expressed in their own way of understanding. Does this mean that it has reduced creativity? Some would argue that it has because the opportunity cost of retelling a story is that another one is not being created. However, the other side argues that creativity may have shot off the roof because reenacting the same challenge but in your own special way increases how creative you have to be to stand out on a platform.

All in all, it is clear that storytelling has morphed into its own art, to say the least, and we look forward to further depicting what it means on a regional, national and global scale for all communities.

What do you think about storytelling and the journey it is taking?

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