The End of Storytelling?

MIT's new Storytelling labette is predicting that storytelling in the 21st century is about to change. In a New York Times article I found here, the ability to tell a "meaningful" story is being challenged by consumer technology, such as text messages. Original storytelling is even more threatened, as the constant connection we all value to our outside world doesn't know when to stop interjecting.

How many times have you or someone you've known checked their cellphone during a movie? Interruptions from the outside world prevent us from immersing ourselves in a story. But even without interruptions, we're so used to the bombardment of phones, texts, emails, etc. that perhaps we can't sit and read a book for long, or sit and watch a movie for two hours. Is it as simple as boredom.

Old stories don't work in our new wired society. Or so the argument goes. Luckily, there are plenty of opposing perspectives and statistics.

The purpose of the lab: "Starting in 2010, a handful of faculty members — “principal investigators,” the university calls them — will join graduate students, undergraduate interns and visitors from the film and book worlds in examining, among other things, how virtual actors and “morphable” projectors (which instantly change the appearance of physical scenes) might affect a storytelling process that has already been considerably democratized by digital delivery."

I tend to believe that people hunger for stories, from gossip at a bar to novels to movies to the sports page. We can't live without them. If they're going to change form, then I'm along for the ride.