People have always told stories. Take Homer, for example, he is considered to be the first and greatest epic poet. He was blind and couldn’t write his stories down, and yet his tales of great wars and tragedies have survived throughout the ages. This is because the Iliad and the Odyssey were told in the form of folk songs, and then sang to the next generation to come along, until they were written down. In pretty much the same, our visual storytelling abilities has gone from plain old blogging to streaming videos – but in our age we don’t have to remember rhymes, we just share the story and the big world of cyber space does the rest.
When blogs were firstly introduced, they were manually updated HTML files. This was a lot of hassle, and if you weren’t familiar with code, it wasn’t easy for you to get your thoughts out there. But the world of the internet being what it is, it didn’t take long for sites to offer blogging platforms and thanks to them, WordPress has been giving users the means to get their words, images and videos across for the last 13-years.
But what happens if you are not a newspaper or someone who wants to, or likes, writing? In comes Instagram – the platform that lets your images tell the story. No attaching photos to emails, no categorising photos into albums, all you have to do is upload an image and whala, you just shared a part of your very own story.
So what happens if you want this up and coming story-telling technology to help you sell products and brands? This is where Snapchat comes in. With the My Story feature, users can post a number of images and short video clips for 24-hours. With such a small time-frame what you put out there has to be good, and it is, with the recording and illustrating features available to you, right there on the platform.
It seems that the world of visual story-telling is showing no signs of slowing down. The latest addition is live videos. Many platforms are investing time and money into giving us the latest space for us to fill with our next chapter.
Individual users will be able to share videos with friends and family in real time so their story is always up-to-date. Businesses or companies whose business is airing shows, can stream live videos with clients, viewers or users of certain products to give advice, share solutions, give instructions on how to use products or simply to entertain.
From Homer to live videos, the way we tell, share and re-tell our stories has come a very, very long way.