Institute For The Future

The Future of Social Networks is Storytelling, Part 1

 

 I write this at the risk of becoming a pariah. I know that the whole Internet industry - driven in equal parts by oversharing Bay Area technorati, brand-monitoring New York ad men, and follower-culting LA celebrity bimbos (male and female) - is agog at the potential of the real-time web. There's even a conference about it. Conversations, it goes, are the next new thing.

 

 

It took the launch of Google Buzz (a really lame Twitter knockoff) and the death of J.D. Salinger (the master of terse dialogue) to really hammer home just what I find so annoying about Twitter and Facebook. There aren't any stories there. Some conversations become really good stories, but unless you follow them in real-time you're S.O.L. They dissipate and hang there in the cloud like a cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes. (props to William Burroughs)

 

 

Ok, you say, the real-time web is searchable, so you can go back in time. But since there's no way to link updates or layer metadata to create a narrative structure, you have to manually sort through timelines and excavate that structure like a cyberspatial Sherlock Holmes. Tags help, but they still stop far short of storytelling. At best, they're like a running transcript of events. Twitter doesn't read like a Salinger novel, because even if there are new Salingers out there in the Tweetverse, they've got no way to write anything more than 140 characters. And if they do, it won't hold together against the fragmentation of search.

 

 

What's intrigued me about web publishing, since long before it was called blogging, is the empowerment of the author to assemble information into a unique point of view. Maybe its because I fancy myself a writer, but I think the web empowers everyone in that way. The excitement around video today is an amplification and extension of that empowerment to new media. But its still storytelling.

 

 

So, this half-baked thought experiment leads me somewhere, I'm gonna throw something out there and see if it sticks. My forecast is - social networks and the real-time web are either a) going to morph into storytelling media that provide tools to construct narrative on top of the update stream, or b) are going to stop growing as people seek out a different set of tools that are better for communication and storytelling than social networks, which do a mediocre job at both. (see our forecast on the future of video communication for some hints of use cases, and our map of the future of video opportunities for tools and platforms)

 

 

Crap, you say. Well, answer this question for me - if you had a really interesting series of conversations on Twitter, say over the course of a day between you and 5-6 other people on a couple of inter-related topics, where and how would you tell that story online? If you answered "a blog post" you'd join my club. If you answered "a video post" you can come in too. If you answered "a tweet saying 'great conversation about sex, drugs and rock'n'roll with @hendrix @jagger @manson'" you lose because that's not a story. Maybe.... just maybe.... its a headline. But where does the story go from there? Nowhere.

 

 

Part 2 next week.