The internet has a completely novel characteristic of being both extremely intimate as well as completely dissociative. These characteristics have often lent themselves extremely well to storytelling (ex. Books, Television, Radio). All of these mediums have been used to create extremely moving and relatable stories, I think partly because the dissociation allows one to be honest and raw and thus relatable.

But once you throw in the "realtime" variable of the internet, I think you lose important tools that enabled these mediums to be so good for storytelling. Specifically you lose the buffer of time and/or the ability to "change the facts to protect the innocent." Neither of these are options on a service such as Twitter, because the discussion revolves around the present making it difficult to change the facts but maintain the "human" element and since it is in the present you lose the buffer of time to reflect and process the emotions, allowing you to then present them in a generally non-offensive way (if you so chose).

That being said I think things like Twitter could be amazing tools for storytelling because they can be so unfiltered and relevant (due to its realtime nature) creating something possibly even more raw and relatable. Using Twitter in this way could be related in some regards to engaging in therapy in an open room filled with your friends and coworkers. And I wonder/worry that this makes it too impossible to gain that important distance which is required for a storyteller to be a good storyteller, and instead you fall into the trap of being a Kaufman-esque "asshole" character who alienates those around them.

So, do you think it is possible to be a storyteller and approach both the good and bad sides of ones self in this environment? Can someone tell a story if it is literally the situation you are existing in at the very moment you are also telling the story?

One of my friends recently said that he edits himself on Twitter (nearly to oblivion) because it has *history*, and he wished that nothing on there could last more than a week.

I think for some (maybe most) people, the idea of being recorded for posterity is pretty scary, and keeps them from being their true selves or exploring other personalities. It's hard to convince yourself to do a Kaufman routine on the net if you think that in a few years, a potential date will find it on Google and decide to stay away. It requires a certain bravery or self-confidence.

When my generation first got on the net, it was exclusively for hackers and college students, and I think that freed us up to explore personalities without any long-term consequences. I was a little bit horrified when Google started collecting and archiving all the old usenet posts from this time. I think when Facebook was exclusively for colleges, it was kinda the same environment for that generation.

I'm not sure if this is a good argument for anonymity, or a handful of pseudonym accounts to play with, or that some sites should just mark themselves as playgrounds. But if we've been doing this since the net started (and almost certainly before), then it's going to keep existing in some form somewhere, always.

Yeah. I think that most people definitely don't want to be Kaufman on the internet. And also a lot of people don't care about the "art of Twitter" so to say. And if you do want to be Kaufman the realtime nature of Twitter enables it in the same way talk shows etc. enabled Kaufman. But what I am less sure about is if it is even possible to play this "storyteller" role on something like Twitter without it just turning into a bad Kaufman act?

I think anonymity or pseudonym is a possible solution or symptom of this issue. But I also think it can detract from the story, and forces you into these pigeon holed personas which are splintered across different (and possibly unconnected to the outside eye) accounts. This is difficult when you think of other forms of storytelling, in which case the context and complexity of the author can play a role in the story itself.

(also I realize in my first post that I said "completely novel" and then went on to give examples of how this is true across all medias, I meant the "realtime" as being completely novel)

So I really liked Egan's story Black Box: storify.com

I'm not sure how relevant it is to the questions you are raising because clearly it was written beforehand and then performed on Twitter. And I didn't even experience it via Twitter but read it in actual physical form in the New Yorker (for godsakes).

But! I love both the idea of the underlying reality of the story emerging as it progressing in real-time. And I like that part of that reveal is from a abstract second-person narrator to a very real harrowing story (part of which thematically is about the need to dissociate.) That's unquestionably an artistic use of the tweet form to me.

Another example of storytelling that could happen in real-time is the publicly blogged IM conversation (disclosure: I think Branch would be great for this.) The Awl has done this a number of times, mostly reviews or reactions. Here is a review:
theawl.com

Here is a reaction:

thehairpin.com

Both of these are presumably edited but could absolutely be done live as a form of extemporaneous storytelling.

Though it can be annoying if done poorly, I often love when people send a series of tweets which articule an ongoing narrative (a rant about X, live tweeting Y, etc.) These short, sequential bursts of information make the event or thought more digestible. This is also why I love Robin Sloan's Fish as a new medium to articulate ideas and tell stories.

Also, the other day our entire team went to a rave together (a fundraising for a Burning Man camp, of course). We lost our summer intern for the last half of the night, and in the morning he shared the story of what happened using GIFS: branch.com

[click the in-line link above – not the one at the bottom]

WRT to real-time, I agree that it isn't great for all types of stories, but it also offers a level of intimate engagement - an experience - which more asynchronous narratives lack.

@Goldman I actually think that story is a really good point. A lot of those tweets stand well on their own, especially in the beginning. And on top of that the story is intense and relatable. But imagine someone you follow tweeting part of that story as it was actually happening to them in the real world? Would you read it any differently?

I think the experience of reading pre-written content performed in real-time would work. But it would need to be episodic and short given that Twitter has trained users to not dwell in the timeline.

In terms of extemporaneous content, it's interesting because there's not much storytelling that happens extemporaneously regardless of whether offline or not. Improv seems to be the best offline example and I think a lot of what folks do in tweets ends up being like real-time online improv (and gives a clue as to why the format is so popular with comedians.)

Yeah that is a really good point about Improv. I think there is definitely room for observational storytelling in the heat of the moment though. For example storify.com

Although I would be interested to find an example of something even more personal.

That storify is AMAZING! Had never seen it.

Were you just keeping that in your back pocket the whole time? Because it kinda proves it to me. It strikes me a new thing too. It's both live reporting but done in a narrative/artful way. It's not about getting the facts out, it's about observing the story.

The fact that it's about / reacting to another event seems key. I could totally imagine an installation where an artist sits in a room at MoMA and tweets observations about the people coming and going. And those tweets are projected in the room. That would be a thing. And potentially compelling.

There was another one recently, in the same vein, where a woman live-tweeted a couple breaking up on her train: janeygodley.blogspot.co.uk

Hahaha I hadn't thought about that story until you mentioned improv!

Are there any examples of people doing this in a personal manner though? Rather than eavesdropping on someone elses conversation?

Something that comes close is the example of the guy who set up a keylogger that tweeted all of his keystrokes: twitter.com. This is obviously less "story" and more an interesting look on privacy, but still comes close to the thing I am interested in of someone discussing a personal struggle in real time.

Another interesting piece is "I Love Alaska" where someone found an interesting story in connecting the AOL searches of a person that were leaked for research purposes (hi greg!) and then narrated the searches over images. vimeo.com

It creates a really gripping and intimate narrative from nothing except what someone has been searching for on AOL.

This article about Jennifer Egan is quite relevant to this discussion.

full-stop.net

"But Twitter-ized fiction can do two important things that nineteenth-century serialized novels could not. One, it can infinitely extend the dissemination period of a story, and thus incorporate a cliffhanger (the engine of a lot of popular fiction) at every level: an author could go so far as to Tweet one word a day, though serialization this extreme might prove alienating. Two, it can find its way into the fabric of our days surreptitiously, and with much less fanfare."

That reminds me of my actual favorite twitter account ever: twitter.com. I have no idea if this person is real or not (more on that later) but it what started as an amazing account of this guy chillin through life, including a cast of nicknamed characters, ended with him impregnating a woman who thought he was a pro surfer by accident. It was one of the most amazing things I have ever been a part of.

But often I would think about whether snakebro is a real person. He is completely unfindable on the internet other than some obscure forum where he possibly posted under the account snakebro.

Does it matter if he is real? When it comes to books there is a difference with fiction and non-fiction. There is a definite difference between staged photography and photojournalism and documentaries vs fictional films. I don't think snakebro would work if you knew it was fake from the start, and I would probably be really bummed out if someone came out after the fact and owned Snakebro as a writing project.

But if it is real he has to hide behind anonymity and pseudonyms. Is that just the requirement for this new age of entertainment?

That guy's photo looks a lot like Chris Martin from Coldplay.

Live tweeting, as I've experienced in advertising, is a growing practice for brands that want to engage their fanbase/consumers and give them immediate access to what "the brand"/tweeter is experiencing in live time (i.e. at a conference, a VIP event, behind-the-scenes).

I think of "brand" as a dirty word in the context of storytelling -- it implies a sales pitch, taking advantage of emotion to increase returns. But that is kind of my point: for the most part, what I've seen of realtime (re)telling has come from an intent to report, but that doesn't mean you as a consumer of the written word can't read it and say, "This is an amazing story."

Take Snakebro, for example, who I'd argue is simply itemizing the action of the moment. Ian, when you read that, it impacts you. That impact, in my opinion, MAKES it a story. So, this idea ends up coming away from "Is it possible to set out to write a story in realtime on the internet?" and moving towards, "What does it take, for me as reader, to understand something as a story, and not a real-time report?" Is it music added on by a third party (I Love Alaska); injecting humor into the telling (Broken Dreams, a story that had my dying of laughter the first time I read it); or a well-known fiction writer announcing, "I will be tweeting a story," through the account of a well-lauded publication?

I woke up this morning to a developer at the WSJ using Branch for Round Robin storytelling:

Speaking of the media (even simply developers within) using the internet to tell stories, I came across the below this morning: a new site (new to me, you guys might know of it already) that allows you to paste together different bits of media to produce an overall story that has been "curated" by the journalist -- i.e. created into a story?

7x7.com

I just found this with the help of Alison tweetheartnovel.com

wow i am actually skimming tweetheart and it is TERRIBLE

Ok, this brings me back to the end of the Egan novel, Visit from the Good Squad (jg, I understand- via twitter- that you found it to be the weakest overall chapter; would be curious to hear more about that). Are we moving into a new age where 'no one' is replaced by 'no1' and 'before' is replaced by 'b4'? How can we maintain the English language in an age of character limits and autocorrect? Is it even worth preserving?

I love Goon Squad - I think the 2nd to last chapter (which I dig) is actually somewhat relevant to this branch as it is entirely about how technology influences storytelling. In the case of Goon Squad, it's powerpoint instead of Twitter.

I'm not overly concerned about the maintenance of the English language because it's always been evolving particularly in usage but even in orthography/glyphs. For example, do we mourn the death of the long s? en.wikipedia.org

Also - because why miss the opportunity to flog a David Foster Wallace essay - his grammar essay (in Harper's as Tense Present) is the first thing I ever read of his.

harpers.org

Ian and I started reading this cyber trilogy called Chat, Connect, and Crash from the early 00s: rainwater.com which is basically a romance told only through emails.

Also, I want my entire twitter archive because I really want to know what I was saying years ago

If Jennifer Egan's luddism is true and yet she is publishing on Twitter as a way of expressing her opposition to the dehumanising nature of technology then surely it's a reinvention of shoring fragments up against a ruin? Sorry I know that's very lame... I was just looking at Snakebro but I wonder if he's a good example of this? I really think his narrative makes beautiful and I would say poetic sense when I look at his profile. I can see his life, so, so different to mine, flickering in front of me. I don't have an e-reader but it really doesn't bother me that these are tweets. Snakebro is really good at grasping an essence and (even if he's fiction) thank you for sharing.

But I spend my day with Tweetdeck open so I would see his Tweets in amongst a ton of clutter. His story is a tiny discontinuous squeak of either invented or actual hip-dom in a wash of other stuff. His tweets are so fragile I suppose.

Now do we really think that the next generation is not going to read novels? My 10 year old watches iCarly and idolises Selina Gomez but she's...about...to...start....reading...Jane....Eyre!

I don't think the question is will this new form of entertainment replace novels, I watch movies and read books and listen to the radio. These things are not exclusive. The question is do you think this new entertainment form is a good tool for fiction (or maybe some new half fiction)