Fact & Fiction - stories that capture depth lost in tweets

Prior to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, sending updates, photos, and stories to friends and family required significant effort and time to write, edit, and distribute content. If you weren’t online or alive in the 90s, two great articles from the New York Times describes them well, A Eulogy for the Long, Intimate Email and How to Write a Family Newsletter Your Friends Will Actually Read.

Social media has made content creation and distribution so effortless anyone is now able continuously stream updates, no matter how thoughtless or mundane. Unfortunately, the tradeoff for speed has been at the expense of depth and quality. More of today’s social media posts would benefit from the effort and editing that went into the bygone compositions.

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”
— Mark Twain

Early Days of Digital

In my circle of friends and family I was that guy, regularly spamming them with lengthy emails and quarterly newsletters. Suffering weekly flight delays while traveling for my consulting job provided the time needed to draft and polish messages. Armed with a degree in technology, I had the skills for efficient distribution: initially an email listserv, then a GeoCities website with static HTLM content and RSS subscription capabilities. It was light years ahead of Friendster and MySpace!

My first digital camera, yes it had ‘floppy’ storage

The website gained attention when I landed an 18-month consulting project in London. Equipped with a Sony Mavica digital camera and a handful of 3.5″ floppy disks, photos brought my adventures to life and added a new dimension to the storytelling. My audience expanded and a post about a trip to Napa was reprinted in The Sacramento Bee!

Unfortunately, it also added a lot of time. Structuring the photos around the content before modern day editing tools was time consuming. My time to create and post went from a few hours to a few days.

Life kept getting busier and busier for myself and my audience. Finding the time to regularly write and publish became impossible. Eventually, I caved and joined the ranks of social media users, signing up for ‘The Facebook’ as it was known. My website grew stale and I eventually pulled the plug.

Enter social media

The original Facebook allowed me to arrange my newsletters into blog posts on ‘The Wall’. Publishing photos was as easy as dragging them from a folder onto the web browser, the site managed content in a structured layout, which saved a ton of time even though the style was never as creative as I would have liked. Tradeoffs.

Then Facebook evolved. They ditched The Wall and blog features with little warning and created the Timeline, which hid writing after a few dozen words. I adapted by writing less, then almost nothing at all. Posts evolved to just photos with captions that attempted to to capture life’s moments. More tradeoffs.

Back to the past

Social media’s strength is capturing singular moments, mere seconds in a day. But without the context and depth that comes from storytelling, today’s posts are doomed to be nothing more than meaningless future fragments.

Recently, I came across a story written for a writers contest about a safari trip to The Kruger with a friend. I was astonished at the level of detail the story captured that I had forgotten. Memories flooded back, enabling a revisit of the drive from Johannesburg into rural Africa and our time at the Sabi Sands Game Reserve. How could I forget so much? Photos of the trip scroll regularly across my Apple TV screensaver, annually Facebook reminds me via the ‘You Have a Memory’ feature, but the scrolling pictures just don’t capture the moment as well as storytelling.

I’ve decided it’s time to bring back the stories. Instead of mindlessly posting on Instagram and Facebook, I’m also going to capture the stories behind them … if only for myself. But I hope you enjoy them too.