Storytelling is shaped by the way we engage with it. In the past, narratives unfolded slowly, giving the audience time to reflect and analyze at their own pace. Classic games, podcasts, and films provided the audience with time to settle into the narrative, and for emotions to build up gradually. These slower forms of media created room for reflection and engagement, allowing audiences to process narratives thoughtfully.Â
Today, modern storytelling puts the audience in the driver’s seat, inviting participation and demanding constant decision making. We can see this in the rise of interactive games and other entertainment. On platforms like YouTube and TikTok, creators compress humor, drama, and emotion into bite-sized bursts, created to encourage rapid engagement. Podcasts are increasingly being designed to be bingeable, with emotion arriving quickly and consistently. Even vlogs condense months of lived experiences into short videos. These mediums are always fun to watch, and we can’t help but admire all of the thought that goes into their creation.Â
The compression and personalization of modern media also changes the emotional landscape. Fast-paced or short-form content provides quick bursts of dopamine creating short emotional sensations, whereas slower forms tend to focus on depth, presence and reflection. Rapid content delivery usually encourages responses quickly, but this is at the expense of slower, more nuanced emotional resonance. Revisiting older or slower media highlights this because attention, emotional processing, and engagement have devolved alongside it. So in this context, nostalgia is instructive, recalling the ways in which media consumption is viewed and used by the broader public. Older media shaped the emotional depth the audience feels when consuming media today, and this explains how slower narratives can restore attention and reflection.Â
The evolution of storytelling goes hand in hand with the way the audience evolves through generations: growing up, or simply becoming more addicted to media consumption. Attention is both a resource and a skill that needs training. One of the main challenges today is to make sure that both coexist to create a form of storytelling that can capture attention and focus to recognize the pull of rapid consumption, while still holding the space for long-form content more intentionally. By doing so, I believe that audiences can navigate a richer media environment to find depth amongst distraction while still feeling present in the moment.
Historically, storytelling was communal; experienced in shared spaces such as theatre or radio shows. Today, it’s increasingly becoming isolated. We see people enjoying media collectively online, but in real life that enjoyment takes place individually. Understanding how storytelling has evolved offers more insight into media structure and how we, as consumers, think, feel, and process the world around us.