Storytelling is an art form that had survived throughout the ages and aeons and is still practice today. It could be deduced that storytelling is as old as time. The popular song from Disney’s feature movie: the Beauty and the Beast goes; “a tale as old as time” cements this statement. From the stone-age to the digital age that we are in now storytelling was, is and always will be an important part of human society.
All human beings have the affinity to be storytellers. We tell stories to each other for various reasons. It could be mainly as entertainment or it could be in order to deliver facts or provide advice via a narrative. Stories span into so many genres targeted at different ages and people. The main genre’s that had permeated through the ravages of time are Comedy, Horror, Romance, Tragedy and Action. Storytelling is essentially a craft that had never stopped evolving and now there is a countless combination of genres and themes that all audiences of stories are spoilt for choice. The people who had been the catalyst to enable this evolution of storytelling is essentially those who ply this craft – the storytellers.
I am very fascinated by the fame that storytellers had achieved ever since the Middle Ages. They were known as bards that travel around learning about different stories and reiterating that to their audiences or come up with their own spin to age-old stories or come up with their own original stories and ply their trade in order to earn money and fame. If these bards gain popularity with their stories and songs they might even get invited into private social circles of the nobles and the rich and ultimately might become a King or Queen’s private bard that lives in the royal castle itself.
Storytelling throughout the ages had evolved into a craft that could be taught by the master storyteller to apprentices. Novice storyteller will learn the craft and take to the road to learn more stories and thus create their own legacy in their journey to become a master storyteller who has the ability to weave beautiful stories for all audiences which elicit a cacophony of human emotions from their audiences. That was and always will be the core pursuit of any storyteller – to be a master of other people’s emotions via their stories.
The paradigm of storytellers being the main authors who create stories and their audiences are the consumers of those stories had been one that worked for ages – till now. With the advent of technology and the democratisation of information to all people in the world, the digital age had permeated into the realm of storytelling as well. It had initiated a paradigm shift of sorts from the power to create only available to those who ply their trade as storytellers to every single human being. In a way, in the digital age, we are going back to the notion that everyone has a story to tell and has commented on stories that have already been told by established storytellers. Now anyone can be a storyteller and publish their stories on the digital highway that we call the World Wide Web.
In the digital era, due to the explosion of different types of media by which stories could be told, there is plenty of different means by which a story could be told. There used to be stories by word of mouth, then there were plays and then stories were written down as books. After that came the Audio-visual age where stories could be shown on video or recorded on the radio. Now with the Digital age stories could be blogged, put as interactive stories via the use of social media and portable devices like tablets and smartphones to allow the audience to engage in the story in a whole new level. The author and the reader work together to give a whole new life to the story that was created by the storyteller. This I believe is the beauty of the digital era in the realm of storytelling- the synergies created by co-creation of stories between readers and writers.
Imagine this, billions of stories had been created since the advent of the craft, however, only a few had survived the ravages of time and is still available for the contemporary audience. These stories are then dubbed classics. However, in the digital era stories will not become like ‘elephants that once their time had come would go to the designated graveyard to die’. No! In the 21st century due to data and technology, all stories are given a new life and even if a story might have ‘died’ it is beautifully revived as analogous to a ‘phoenix’ rising from the ashes to tell its story once more in different forms or to new audiences.
The ‘phoenix’ had given rise to such things as an adaptation of stories into different media or transmedia storytelling or even fan fiction where if any story is told, it gives the story a vigour of life that makes it evolve into new forms and be told again and again till the end of time.
Thus, I say that this era is actually a golden era of storytelling where any story could be told to the world to anyone who would listen. Storytellers and their audiences are not disconnected as they used to be in older eras where stories can only thrive as long as the storyteller lives or it will only be heard in his vicinity. But now all those obstacles have been demolished so that anyone who has a story to tell – in any form or media can tell it so that anyone from the rest of humanity who would like to hear that story can be his audience.
The digital age has just begun and thus brought about a lot of challenges as well. To name a few of the contemporary issues that’s faced in the realm of storytelling are: how to adapt old stories into new media, whether to put a new spin on an old story or is that a sacrilege to the old story, how to achieve storytelling in a transmedia landscape and even copyright and intellectual property right of stories to keep earnings from the story with the original storyteller, not copycats.
The times that we live in is an exciting time for storytelling. With so many ways to tell a story or revive old stories and connect with audiences, it is not wrong to say that the craft of storytelling had entered a new frontier where it is open to all human beings to come up with stories to tell in any media for anyone who would listen to enjoy. As I write this I can’t keep myself still as I am euphoric, ecstatic and full with joy at all the possibilities of coming up stories in different ways in this era. So what are you waiting for, go out there, put pen on paper, hands on a keyboard, press a shutter on a camera or video a story using a smartphone or tablet! Come up with your stories and listen to mine. Let’s go create some magic – let’s tell a story.
