Paul Ford, a veteran of Harper’s and an innovative technologist and storyteller, has written a fascinating essay on how the success of social media, and specifically the linear news feed, has shaped the evolution of narrative:
Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions. This world of old media is like a giant steampunk machine that organizes time into stories. I call it the Epiphanator, and it has always known the value of a meaningful conclusion. The Epiphanator sits in midtown Manhattan and clunks along, at Condé Nast and at the Times and in Rockefeller Center. Once a day it makes a terrible grinding noise and spits out newspapers and TV shows. Once a week it spits out weeklies and more TV shows. Once a month it produces glossy magazines. All too often it makes movies, and novels.
At the end of every magazine article, before the “■,” is the quote from the general in Afghanistan that ties everything together. The evening news segment concludes by showing the secretary of State getting back onto her helicopter. There’s the kiss, the kicker, the snappy comeback, the defused bomb. The Epiphanator transmits them all. It promises that things are orderly. It insists that life makes sense, that there is an underlying logic.
And the Epiphanator, understood as a kind of hive-mind, is keenly aware of the threat posed by social media, and has been keen to attack it. Yet Ford argues that the Epiphanator is stronger and more resilient than is commonly understood:
We’ll still need professionals to organize the events of the world into narratives, and our story-craving brains will still need the narrative hooks, the cold opens, the dramatic climaxes, and that all-important “■” to help us make sense of the great glut of recent history that is dumped over us every morning. No matter what comes along streams, feeds, and walls, we will still have need of an ending.
Ford’s essay is a wonderful companion to Tyler Cowen’s The Age of the Infovore, and it sheds light on the centrality of storytelling in an advanced economy, a theme we’ve touched on in this space with respect to the limits of the concept of the “real economy.”