Storytelling on Social Media. The Never Ending story.

What follows is an extract from the two-day course on Social Media Marketing that runs at Goldsmiths. If you get to the end and want more - sign up. Next one starts in Feb18th and 25th 2017.

https://www.gold.ac.uk/short-courses/social-media-marketing/

The Distracted Present

“We tend to live in the distracted present, where the forces of the periphery are magnified and those of in front of us ignored. Our ability to create, plan, much less follow through on, is undermined by our need to be able to improvise our way through any number of infernal impacts that stand to derail us at any moment.”

Douglas Rushkoff – Present Shock 2015

The Distraction Economy

The aesthetics of online content is partly created by the need to be direct in an attention lead economy, but also by the constraints and demands of the technology itself. Being able to create content that works well within these limitations is a clear digital skill. For example, it used to be said of newspaper journalists, that the key skill was being able to create a summary of an entire story within the first paragraph. It would now seem that creating the entire story with the headline is the key skill. This would certainly be true of Twitter.

However the skills of being able to tell a good story on social media go beyond this insight. Social Media and Smartphones are restructuring the way we experience information. It may take several hundred years for this to fully play out. However, early studies are starting to come in and the more we understand this the better storytellers we can become. 

·     We are less able to remember information as we crowd source answers from friends and Google.

·      We are less able to concentrate if we know we have a message on our phones that we have not answered.

·     What we often what we think of as multi-tasking is in fact just task switching.

·     Distraction is hindering our ability to process memories and store them long term.

This is the reality that our social media updates go into. You might liken it little like shouting to a friend in a hurricane in a world where people are addicted to walking in hurricanes.

The choices open to the storyteller here are clear.

We can shout louder.

We can shout more often.

We can go out and grab people, take them somewhere more sheltered and whisper in their ear.

Okay. So I’ve extended the analogy way too far. But the key thing. Don’t add to the speed of the wind! Be relevant to peoples lives. Be human.

The Distraction Economy? The Apps on our phones often try and keep us hooked. Want to find out how and why they do it? Either Google Tristam Harris – ‘How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds?—?from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist.’ Or click on the following link: https://medium.com/swlh/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3#.p752wepgu

The 6-second rule.

When YouTube were trying to develop advertising packages, they found something very interesting. If they forced users to watch a 7 second ad before watching content they had clicked on, then the majority of users didn’t bother watching the content. The ad put them off. However if the ad was 6 seconds, then the majority of people did watch the content. It seems that in the attention based economy there is something about 6 seconds that is important. It represents the amount of risk that people are prepared to take that the content that they are about to see is worth the time. (This is why Youtube came up with the idea of the ‘skipable’ ad, and if advertisers wanted to force you to watch an entire ad, they had to pay. If you clicked Skip, before the allotted time, the advertiser didn’t pay.)

With the now defunct social network ‘Vine’ we saw a similar 6-second rule. Vine was a short-form video hosting service where users could share six-second-long looping video clips.

Here the 6-second restraint was also to do with the fact that the majority of content was consumed on smartphones. As data takes more time to download across mobile networks it was important to keep the experience as a fast moving one for the user. Secondly, data costs money on mobile phone networks and so limiting the amount of data being used also made sense.

So the technology mediates not only how we tell a story, but also how we understand that story. In all spoken of communication there is a certain amount of what is called ‘redundancy’. A certain amount of information that is lost in the process of transmission. (Walter J Ong) This effects the way that the story is told. Certain key pieces of information are repeated in order to cater for this. For example, in the Odysee, Homer talks about ‘Flashing-Eyed Athene’. This epithet helps the listener visualize and anchor a character.

On social media, where your story is placed within a ‘timeline’ of many other competing stories, then this is also true. To get a story across, it may need to be repeated. To get a story across you may need to anchor it with specific hashtags that you use consistently.

Twitter themselves suggest that to reach the majority of your followers in a day you will need to post three times. The skill here is in varying the same message. However for many, this will feel like that they are talking speaking too much, or ‘over-sharing’. However, this is to assume that you will reach all your followers with a single update. This is certainly NOT the case. 

Look at the following piece of Blackpool Rock. Where ever you break it, it will always read Blackpool Rock. It is the same with your brand within social media. Wherever people join your story, a clear identity should emerge. 

What makes people lose interest in a story?

We may often feel that it is boredom that makes people stop listening to a story. Douglas Rushkoff suggests that it is more likely to be because they are angry.

‘You don't click the remote to change channels because you are bored, but because you are mad. Someone you don't trust is attempting to make you anxious.’  - Douglas Rushkoff – Present Shock

Douglas suggests that this ‘someone’ who is trying to make you anxious, is generally an advertiser, selling you something that you don’t want, in a way that is inauthentic. 

Think about it the next time you change channels, fast forward an ad-break or un-friend someone. It may be because they have made you angry with some information that you don’t like. Therefore you choose a different story. (When was the last time you picked up a newspaper that you know you will disagree with?)

Another of Douglas Rushkoff’s theories that illuminates social media storytelling is that of ‘Collapsed Narrative’. In this theory, he argues that there has been no society that not told stories. They are ways in which we hand over knowledge and cultural values to the generations to the next. Stories are comforting and orienting, they ‘help smooth out obstacles and impediments, recasting them as bumps along the road to some better place.’ 

The theory of ‘Collapsed Narrative’ looks at this kind of narrative in the context of an ‘always on’ the digital world. Traditional narrative techniques in drama,  would take a character with whom we identify, put them in some kind of danger, heighten that tension to unbearable levels, then a create a climax followed by a speedy resolution. The tension is relieved. On TV often these moments of tension will be relieved by an ad-break, and the products themselves will be associated with the positive emotion. This narrative arc, has a beginning a middle and en end. However, digital narratives, especially those in Social Media do not have a traditional ‘Beginning Middle and End.’ Not only are they experienced in fragmentary form, but it is also possible to click off and follow links in other directions, whilst the story is being told. Narrative is operating more like a computer game, a world to be explored, as opposed to a journey to be followed. ‘Collapsed Narrative’ is where narrative that isn’t so much about a character winning or losing, it is more a creative exercise in how long we can keep the game going. The same is true of social media storytelling. It isn’t a story with a beginning, middle and an end, it is a story that keeps going. In fact you might call it a ‘never ending story that is also a creative game’. The real storytelling skill here is to keep the content interesting for a prolonged amount of time. It is the difference between writing a play, and writing a soap opera.