It is in our nature to tell stories and inform others of our life events. Storytelling, whether factual or fictional, is an intrinsic human characteristic. However, the way we communicate with others has changed drastically over time. Storytelling originated with visual stories, such as cave drawings, and then shifted to oral traditions, in which stories were passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. There was then a shift to words formed into narratives, including written, printed and typed stories.
Due to the use of advancing technologies such as the printing press, the camera and the internet and its social media platforms, the way we tell others stories and keep ourselves informed about current topics has shifted to a more all-encompassing experience. Technology has allowed humans to utilize all forms of storytelling through the years: visual stories in photographs, spoken stories in videos and recordings and written words on blogs and statuses.
Oral tradition is a form of human communication wherein knowledge, art, ideas and cultural material is received, preserved and transmitted orally from one generation to another.
Oral traditions have changed but have not disappeared, but their power and use remain. The image of an oral telling may be caught on paper, film or in digital format. However, the presence of teller and audience, and the immediacy of the moment are not fully captured by any form of technology. It always changes from one telling to the next depending on the voice and mood of the storyteller, the place of its telling, the response of the audience. For hundreds of years prior to the invention of writing, which is a very recent discovery in the history of humankind, oral tradition served as the sole means of communication available for forming and maintaining societies and their institutions.
The use of technology has shaped the way that we interact with others and how we tell stories. Starting from around the year 1800, technology has contributed to the creation of photography, motion pictures, telephones, radio, TV, digital media, mobile media and social media; the current most influential form of communication is social media.
Media platforms such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have grown in popularity in the 21st century. All of these platforms allow users to express their thoughts in a public manner with everyone on the Internet or to choose with whom to share their information. Twitter and Facebook allow users to post statuses, photos and videos of memories and personal stories. Instagram, a photographic-based platform, enables users to share only photos or videos.
Social media has allowed us to transfer information instantly and given us the ability to portray ourselves to other people in whatever way we want them to see us, creating a new form of human communication.
Oral tradition represents a vital and multifunctional means of verbal communication that supports diverse activities in diverse cultures. As humankind’s first and still most ubiquitous mode of communication, it bears a striking resemblance to one of the newest communication technologies, the Internet. Like oral tradition, the Internet works by varying within limits, as when software architects use specialised language to craft Web sites or when a user’s clicking on a link opens up multiple (but not an infinite group of) connections. Both the Internet and oral tradition operate via navigation through webs of options; both depend upon multiple, distributed authorship; both work through rule-governed processes rather than fossilised texts; and both ultimately derive their strength from their ability to change and adapt.