Storytelling has been a primal human method of communication for millennia. Each and everyone one of us is a storyteller whether it’s about our past, our future or just our daily activities. The enjoyment we get from simply telling someone a story, especially when it’s around ourselves, is a deep desire of expression that we all share. Who hasn’t felt inspired by a friends expression of joy at finding a new place of interest or sharing in the pictures of a trip far away to different country? Hyper-connectivity and the ability to keep in touch with friends at a click of a mouse button is evolving the way we tell stories to each other, leading to more abstract forms of expression by everyday people more akin to that of artists. The Internet, as medium, is not just changing the way we communicate, it’s changing the way we express ourselves.
Everybody and their dog has a Facebook account, and those that don’t are seen, these days, as being on the same social level as a Buddhist monk living on the roof of the world in Tibet. Facebooks success can be attributed to two things; firstly, luck. It came around just as the MySpace generation was growing up and going to University. Facebook originally only allowed university student to join, a fear maybe that MySpace culture of trying to create the most visually incomprehensible collection of pages on the internet was going to spread to it’s service. Secondly, it’s simply functionality and structured system of networks and pages meant people had a easy, quick way to express themselves. Obviously Facebook abstracts the process of storytelling but the feeling of excitement and inspiration from seeing someone you know enjoying themselves resonates with something deep inside us. It doesn’t stop there however, like the Impressionists, we are revolutionizing the way we express moments of impression.
The Internet has opened up a world of information and opportunity to interact with each other. We are bombarded by media from around the world; organized, referenced, and served to our doorstep (or desktop?) thanks to services like the RSS feed and social tools such as Twitter. A movement under the young generation of people, who have grown up around this, is manifesting itself on websites like Youtube and Flickr. User generated content is growing fast out from the Internet underworld and being launched at our desktops thanks to rise of blogs and the insatiable need for original content in the blogosphere. People are remixing, re-finding and sharing content to express themselves. Widely available media editing software, some opensource, is making it easy for a young teenage boy in Shenzhen, China to mix his favourite song together with his favourite anime show, or for a young portrait artist to share his anatomical studies and get advice from a much wider community of artists than that living in his native village in the middle of Mexican countryside. Instructables is good example of a community developing around the love of one way of expressing yourself. The community posts interesting, step by step do-it-yourself craft projects ranging from the realistic (A modular recycled water jug storage system) to the down right crazy (Building a time machine anyone? How about Fire Shaving….). This method of storytelling is driving forward the DIY movement documented no where better than at the Maker Faire, held every year, it brings together a community of people from all over the world. This is the power of user generated content, the power of the community thinking, not just the individual.
More traditional methods of storytelling are also finding their ways onto the Internet through websites like Hitotoki which provides “narrative maps” of different cities. Each post is a short story or experience “describing pivotal moments of elation, confusion, absurdity, love or grief — or anything in between”. Each narrative is a small window into someone elses life where for a brief moment we are exposed to the persons likes, dislikes, opinions and desires. Each story is even accompanied by a GPS location and map, as if we were a God looking down on our creation. With access to hundreds of thousands of blogs expressing the same stories and emotions on a daily basis the power of the internet is harnessed by Jonathan Harris in his art work, We Feel Fine. Scanning thousands of blogs daily for the words ‘I feel’, we are presented with a visual representation of human consciousness and emotion. The detached nature of viewing the emotions presented by the program is akin to that of a photographer or a writer, except these are real stories, created by real people. The artist here is not just the creator of the website, it is every single entity presented within it.
The true beauty is that through the general anonymity of the Internet it has evolved to be the carrier of our emotions, our desires, our past and our future. Like the cave paintings that showed the daily life and ancient stories of our ancestors, the Internet is our cave and we are recording our stories, as a community, for the generations to come.