When it comes to telling the Web, immersed in relevant blogs and websites, journals and reference books almost inevitably to the concept of storytelling. Time is then the talk of multimedia storytelling, then of web storytelling, digital storytelling or of online storytelling. But: What is that exactly?

In principle, the online storytelling is nothing more than a storytelling. The "storytelling", understood as "storytelling" is conceptualized very far from the newspaper report to the hypertext novel, from web video to the podcast - they are all stories. Even a blog post like this is ultimately a story. It's not about forms of fairy tales or bedtime stories moms, like the "storytelling" in the wording might also evokes. Basically it is the way how online content is mediated specifically.

Currently not in the news yet on RTL
Is also on the web here: Every story presupposes a tell-cost, real or fictitious events. Without such an event, there is no story to tell - neither on the web nor in the book or the movie, either as a play or in the newspaper, either in the news or at RTL date.

Are then selected at least two aspects of an event, and (theoretically or practically) placed next to each other, then provides exactly one that makes every story: It creates a connection. The comic theorist Scott McCloud has illustrated this basic ingredient of each storytelling with an online comic project years ago, Project title: The Story of Carl.

To start his Carl's history, he noted at the time two comic images side by side on a web page: The first picture shows Carl, who promises his mother that he is sober just take the car and guaranteed not drink. The second picture shows a grave stone with the inscription "RIP Carl". Even these two simple drawings construct a context and thus a tension.

Two drawings = a new story.

How this tension between the two images is dissolved, McCloud had to start deliberately open and called on its website on to send him suggestions for the "in-between". By 2001, made with more than 1000 users. And as a result it became a kind of comic wall on which the stories are gathered in dozens of Carl intersecting paths and hundreds of images. By the way, there is therefore an early document collaborative storytelling on the Web.

Collaborative Novel: The Complete Stories of Carl

In online storytelling is thus concerned with the telling of stories in the broadest sense. These aspects of a real or fictitious events are taken in order to create suspense. The new and specific to the online storytelling is that there are no longer separate the traditionally separated media mode (font, photo, audio, video, animation) and for storytelling can be linked to each other - and this in a text area, the very special degrees of freedom offers, such as real-time news, three-dimensionality, nonlinearity or ubiquity. Online Storytelling is therefore in essence nothing new, because here it's simply about storytelling. What is new is that it uses the possibilities of the Internet. In journalism can be accordingly already a number webtypischer Darstellungsfomen identify the forms and evolution will surely let even incur further samples.

Related Links:

Storytelling on the Web: Online Journalistic text forms