Storytelling not dead

This is from Rachel Shulman, a student at UW-Madison:

Prof. Sue Robinson recently sent around this story on how the internet is killing storytelling. In it, Ben Macintyre laments the demise of the narrative. He blames the spawn of the digital age – Twitter, Facebook, blogs, smart phone applications – for the imperilment of the long-form story. According to Macintyre, our reliance on a medium of “interactive chatter and noise” is eroding our culture.

When I read this story, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the philosophy of Neil Postman, a media theorist who was most well known for his 1985 book on television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman deplored technology’s ability to distribute more information faster, arguing that it fills our heads with fragments of irrelevant, disorderly, and superficial information. Postman feared that television meant the demise of the written language and reason; he predicted that its rise signaled the demise of cultural values. Sound familiar?

I don’t think that Postman nor Macintyre give the story reader/listener/watcher enough credit. Long-form narratives aren’t dying – they’re just changing. The internet allows users to piece together their own multi-media narratives from many different sources. I don’t think we can ascribe any more value to narratives that follow a prescribed (and often predictable) structure determined by the storyteller than narratives that follow a network-based structure determined by the user.