Storytelling in the Digital Era

Since the turn of the century many great minds and talented craftsmen have left us to cope on our own. The longing which I would by no means call nostalgic but a sincere realisation that an era where historic contracts were signed and the fashion of building reality as we still know it today had passed. We are at the turn of accepting a great change, we all have new tools within our reach to grasp this somehow altered reality we are in. We have all the knowledge developed by the previous generations still available for us; how do we want to preserve it, what do we want to use it for?

Walter Benjamin raised this concern in the context of storytelling: "The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out."


Still there are also things unchanged: the urge to interact with the world, feeling of friendship, sadness, joy, togetherness, belonging, sharing, also with all critical aspects present. The leading role of a human character, human emotions and the societies we live in, have not yet been replaced by those of machines, abstraction or technology as a focal point of storytelling. As Hannah Arendt reflects on it: "Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."



The fashion of how to tell a good story may have found new formalities and as such developed new techniques for telling, but the stories are only complete when the audience brings the virtual world into the actual one, combining their own reality with the one perceived from the audio-visual screen. This multidirectional movement is one of the keys for the storytelling of new media art of today. Hoping that this new era will enable us to carry forward with this ancient form in humanity!


One lead we could consider following can be found from the writings of John Steinbeck: "A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight."