„Narrative has existed in every known human society. Like metaphor, it seems to be everywhere: sometimes active and obvious, at other times fragmentary, dormant, and tacit. We encounter it not just in novels and conversation but also as we look around a room, wonder about an event, or think about what we do next week. (…) Making narratives is a strategy for making our world of experiences and desires intelligible. It is a fundamental way of organizing data.“
~ Edward Branigan in Narrative Comprehension and Film.

As described in this quote, modes of storytelling have alwaysbeen dominant in classical media - from books to moving forms like cinema and TV.

The Internet with his decentred hypertext-structure bore down this heritage. The new medium is valued as an information medium. The user is no longer depending on what is presented by the media producers, but can choose his way through the net on his own.

The usability paradigm with its slogan “form follows function” went a step further – all entertaining aspects have been subordinated under the ascendancy of functionality. For some years more visual and experimental approaches, using Flash-Animations, were judged as being too playful and useless.

The internet of the next generation everyone is talking about right now, the web 2.0, stands pretty much in this tradition. Blogs are easy to use and give more control to the users, as all forms of user-generated content do. But the use of templates has the side-effect of standardization – blogs are easy to use, but the all look quite the same.

Within the very last years there have been more Flash-Websites again, using rich media content like video, to bring a more entertaining and emotional experience to the user.

Let’s start off with an example:

Backstage at Accenture - Transition from an informative website to a more personal and emotional one.

„Oh, there you are! Welcome! What do you think of our career site? Structured? Informative? Hopefully, it’s built for that.
But hey, we want to show you something more, something much more personal! Voila! Welcome Backstage!”

I’m choosing this page as the first example for new forms of storytelling of the web, because it illustrates the transition. Accenture is a very a serious company, so they are expected to have a structured and informative side. For their recruiting program they’ve chosen a video site. The 6 stories of Accenture employees maybe do not reflect all fields of work available in the company, but they give the visitor of the side a very personal and instant impression.

Primarily commercial web sites use more and more rich-media content, there’s almost no car manufacturer or mobile phone company without moving content on their website. (See these two examples for inspiration).

Volvo S80 - „Three architects and a borrowed car. Lost in a city with 16 million peole. And a meeting they just can’t miss.”

Nokia N800 -”The InternetWalk”

First reason seems to be the more personal and emotional appeal of videos. If you want to sell a product, it’s obvious that it’s easier to promote an image of your brand with a video than with a informative product sheet. But there could be another reason: If you tell an exciting story, the user stays longer on your website. Here you can see a conflict between the basic concepts of the different media. While the hypertextual Internet has been following a decentred organisational structure, film has always been a linear flow of information.

Will the commercial video websites support more linear forms and push back the hypertext paradigm?

There’s no answer to this question yet. But one more fact has to be considered. The rules of storytelling have been developed for centuries and therefore are quite strict. Although the Internet is a young medium it has already developed his own formal rules. The hypertext idea is a promise to the user: the promise to act. If you present a normal advertisement on a website he probably gets bored because he can’t click anywhere.

So what’s the solution? Is their a combination of decentral hypertext and linear narration? Can we develop interactive Stories?

Read my propositions in part 2 (Narrative Forms) and part 3 (Interactive Narratives) of the article on Storytelling on the web here soon. Meanwhile any comments are deeply appreciated!