Ambient Lit and the Death of Storytelling @ Link Wanderlust

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Reading is changing. Have you heard of a trend called Ambient literature? I hadn’t until I came across this story – The immersive new book trend you need to know about by Sarah Shaffi. This new kind of literature takes the reader’s environment into account to create a more involved reader experience. So if it is raining outside your window, it will start reading in the book too. The interior spaces you inhabit feature in the story sometimes. The book uses camera apps and maps on the reader’s phone to replicate real-time experiences. Not surprisingly this method has been put to use to create an engaging ghost story.

nerdo illustration hands spring inspiration GIF

Has storytelling really become a thing of the past- there was a time when the loss of oral stories was decried but now social media tells everyone’s story every minute. People craft narratives of themselves to sell themselves, to advertise or merely to be the go-to guide. So Fernandes questions this excess- could curated narratives be considered storytelling?

“The Italian narrative theorist Alessandro Portelli says that when we tell stories, we switch strategically between the modes of the personal, the political, and the collective. The contemporary boom of curated storytelling has involved a shift in emphasis away from collective and political modes of narration toward the personal mode. “

Stories cannot be capsuled for a happy fb moment; there’s so much more that’s needed to understand the true plight of say someone who has been oppressed. Although stories are the talk of the hour and the beginning of many a revolutionary hashtag, we may still need to go back to the ancients who had perfected the oral storytelling method. Do you agree? Read The evisceration of storytelling by Sujatha Fernandes.

 

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