Institute For The Future

The Future of Social Networks is Storytelling Part 2

Last week, in Part 1, I wrote about my frustration with the ephemeral nature of social network conversations (cacophony would be a better word). There remain very few possibilities for layering stories on top of the raw torrent of data being producing by the real-time web.

I think there are two places where a more narrative-driven future for social media is starting to emerge: location-based apps, alternate reality games. But they still have a long way to go. There are several more layers of interpretative structure that need to be built up on top of social networks for them to really come into their own.

Let's start with location-based applications. Foursquare, which allows people to clock their visits to virtually any public or semi-public venue is starting to layer storytelling capabilities through the use of tip lists and badges that are awarded as placeholders for past behaviors. Combined with public displays of users' check-in histories, these actively and passively user-created markers provide the first elements of a story - stories about me, stories about my neighborhood, stories "about last night". I expect that going forward, we'll see more apps like CheckoutCheckins, which builds off Foursquare's API to help you visualize your own activity in context. While right now its just a static aggregate picture...

...[G]oing forward, the site will also add a way to view your progress by the day, so you can look back on a particularly epic night out, then make sense of it later on. This can be helpful for those times you've lost something and want to retrace your steps. -Cnet

 

Voila! A storytelling layer!

Alternate reality games (ARGs) are another place where we see social networks crossing over into the storytelling tool realm. At the Institute for the Future, we've run several large ARGs over the last two years - Superstruct, Ruby's Bequest, CryptoZoo, and AfterShock - that all created social networks for people to role-play the future. Within the fictional scenarios provided by our own forecasters, people from all walks of life were given the means to tell their own stories through a stream of "real-time" updates from the future. ARGs channel social streams into stories, in part by bounding the conversation. The boundaries shape roughly what the story is ultimately about, but the social conversations populate that story with exquisite detail and variation.

The next big step for ARGs and applications like Foursquare is going to be crossing the gap from playful to poignant. Foursquare probably isn't being used to document the Haiti earthquake recovery, but it actually could be quite useful platform for tracking the psychogeography of displaced people. If a similar event were to happen in New York today, it would be an invaluable tool for anyone looking to collect and interpret the city's mindframe - in real-time or at a later point.

Part of where I think social networks need to move is to give people the ability to author stories, and to recruit and notify others that they are part of that story. The best online games make this explicit - you participate precisely because you want to be part of a story. Joining a group isn't a story. Stories have focal points - beginnings and ends. Social networks just sort of fade. Games also put conversations into stories by putting them in a context of activity. I'm guessing that very few people ever look back beyond a week or two and say "hey, remember that Twitter conversation we had two years ago?" But you can bet your pants they remember the conversation that unfolded in their World of Warcraft VoIP chat when their clan slayed monster X.

Jane McGonigal's recent talk at the TED conference made the claim that game designers have the opportunity to mobilize virtual networks that can do real things in the real world. They know how to get people into a positive frame. I think they do that by involving people in stories that mean something to them. As the novelty of social networks fade, they are going to have to offer people the opportunity to do something more than just belong to a group. They need the tools to make that group part of a larger story, that is actively authored by many.