A game of telephone: How technology changed the way we tell stories (10/17)

When you’re in elementary school, and the only source of technology that you have at your disposal is the phone that hangs on the wall in your kitchen, the art of storytelling was everything. My first real taste of storytelling was the game telephone. You sit in a circle, and one person has a word or phrase that they whisper to the person next to them, and that person whispers it to the person next to them, and so on and so forth, until you get to the last person in the circle and they say what they heard. Phrases like “I like Christmas” would turn into “My bike listens” between 10 kids.

Stories at that were such a. big part of my life. Having my dad sit on the edge of the bed, and work through the pile of books he said he’d read to me before it was time to go to sleep. And then when I got older and I could read chapter books by yourself. All these stories, being funneled into my brain verbatim, were interesting and wonderful, and when I would talk about them or try to regurgitate what I had read it usually came out pretty accurate, because there was no reason for them not to. Strangely enough, as you get older, and start tuning into what is going on outside in the real world rather than the one of The Magic Tree House or Harry Potter, it becomes more clear that the stories in the books were much easier to follow and regurgitate, because there is nothing not to trust. I distinctly remember one summer at camp, a professional storyteller came during recess and instead of play outside we had to listen to her. She had no notebooks, no posters, no materials at all, and she sat down and told me by far three of the best stories I had ever heard in my life. And she had made them all up on the spot, from beginning to end. When asked why she didn’t write her stories down or have anything to help her, she said that telling stories was natural to her, like eating and breathing. If she introduced the nuances of the digital world we were living in, she would taint her craft.

In middle school, I was introduced by a friend to Wattpad. It was this website where kids would go and write stories, and other kids would read. It was like an online book store, for free, where all the writers were teens and pre teens. Some people would upload a whole story, while others would upload a new chapter every week, or every two weeks. And the writers could gain followers and fans, they took requests for new chapters, new stories, even new characters. It was like a totally interactive publishing house that took out the middle man… the publisher. Readers had access to the author and the authors would write to the will and desire of the readers for the most part. It was amazing because it was like sitting down to watch a new episode of your favorite show every week.

I tell these stories to cushion my point which is that when you’re young, the best part about stories is that they’re 40% what you’re reading or being told, and they’re 60% your imagination. The movie playing in your head. And that’s enough, when you’re little that’s all there really is, your imagination. It propels you forward, the thoughts of what could be. In todays digital age, the art of the pen to paper has gotten lost. Movies, virtual reality, tik-tok, all of these and more have eliminated that middle man. The middle man being the imagination. Now you can hear about something, and then go and watch it two minutes later. There’s no more trying to imagine what the characters in the book look like, because the book is gonna be a movie any day now. What technology has done to the art of storytelling is take the intangible out of it. Anything that can be written down can now be created, nothings to elaborate or impossible. There is literally a movie for every single Harry Potter book. In a way, the imagination is gone, because it is hard to imagine something that’s right in front of you. What I mean by that is it’s hard to try and imagine Harry Potter not being Daniel Radcliffe. When someone had painted the picture for the world its not easy to paint it for yourself. It is almost as though we were all playing a big game of telephone, guessing, interpreting, imagining, and then they took out all the middle men and just made it a two person game. The writer, and the person who digitizes it, and all the imaginers and interpreters just sit and observe, because their jobs are being done for them. While this may seem dramatic, it’s real. I have a 7 year old cousin who reads books with an expectation of watching the movie directly after.

If you are fortunate enough to become the person who digitizes things that’s one thing, but for the masses that is unrealistic. Most of us are watching the trailers, not creating them. The digital age has cut the imagination out of storytelling for the masses.