Page 190 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

Cultural business models on the Internet190economic and social development. It is probably one of the cases in which the Internet gives back to stories their oldest and most intrinsic power, which is none other than that of gathering and grouping people together around a story that contains a message.Does the Internet have anything to do withthe surge of interest in many television series? The social media are a vast territory for sharing emotions and commenting on different episodes in real time, and for measuring emotional peaks and identifying emotions in relation to the story.Fanfiction stories run in parallelto TV series on the social media and generate large communities and significant content.Television series (like some talent contests) are the first case of real-time collective interaction of huge communities with content. Spontaneous and highly popular fanfiction stories run in parallel to the TV series on the “second screen”, to the extent that there are people who follow episodes through what the communities say about them on the social media. This is notonly hugely broadening the scope of traditional broadcasting, but also steering the path of its successive development: authors greatly take into account all the interactions and reactions of the communities when deciding on how the stories are to unfold.TV series are also interesting because they are very long stories on which fans develop a sort of dependence, a need not to miss an episode andnot to let anyone tell them beforehand about episodes that have already been aired (in other countries, other languages, etc.), a wish to share and comment with other fans. All this goes on for months, even years, in a story that cannot and should not ease the emotional tension.At the opposite extreme, we have immediate, very fast-paced stories aimed at achieving maximum engagement in a limited time. One of the most striking examples is the well-known Humans of New York,34 a Tumblr createdin the summer of 2010 that has a Facebook community of nearly twelve million peopleand has become a format for publishing on this platform. Posts consisting of a photo and a text capture an instant and a fragment of a person’s life but are capable of harbouring a whole story, in a city with one of the strongest identitiesin the world. The result is several hundreds of thousands of “likes” and dozens of thousands of comments and shared stories.The gathering power of the stories of large and small communities has been given a new lease of life thanks to the Web. Stories that arise in another place are topics of discussion and are shared on the Net: the most striking case isthe “TED talks”, videos that are often shared millions of times, creating real Web stars; Candy Chang’s offline project “Before I die”35 and live storytelling shows featuring ordinary people, such as “Spark London”,36 are just a few more examples.We should also mention libraries, around which a major debate has revolved for years on what their future role should be. Thanks to digital technology, they can increase their functions:The digital age is transforming storytelling