The vestigial tale

Telling the tale: Long-form narratives such as (counterclockwise from top) the St. Petersburg Times' feature "The Girl in the Window," the Bible, Gary Smith's "Beyond the Game" and Leo Tolstoy's novels on 19th-century Russian life would need more acreage than what's available on tiny cellphone screens. (Screenshot From Tampabay.com; Tolstoy Portrait By Vladimir Voinovich: David Hoffman/the Washington Post; Cellphone: Joel Garreau/the Washington Post)

There's a furious adapt-or-die mentality among media organizations. Researchers say we're becoming a "society of scanners." They say the Internet is a "link medium." We find ourselves abandoning stories in mid-sentence. Newspaper executives have embraced a new format known as "charticles," which are, in the words of the American Journalism Review, "combinations of text, images and graphics that take the place of a full article." The Orlando Sentinel, for example, now has a front page crammed with graphics, columnist head-shots, bulletins, story keys, headlines, bumpers, tags, indexes, an advertisement -- a cartoon! -- and lots of pleas to check the Web site.

There is much confusion about what, precisely, should vanish in this broad media makeover. Is it print? Or just long stories? Or just bad, boring, dishwater-dull stories? Complicating the situation is that the online world is both increasingly dominant and, for many media organizations, stubbornly unprofitable. If you're a media exec, wrap your head around the paradox that print is dead and online news a bust.

The sages say that we've reached a situation where "content creation" no longer pays. Only "aggregation" is profitable. It's a freak variant of Darwinism -- the survival of the parasitic. But obviously there will be little of value to aggregate if only rich people and dilettantes can afford to type up their thoughts.

Facebook is another big challenge for narrative. It's hard to sustain a story on a page designed to put you in contact with your 1,374 close personal friends. Writing on someone's "wall" is often just a step up from spray-painting a railroad overpass.

To a remarkable degree, bloggers aren't storytellers. They are partisans, ranters, linkers. Bloggers give away their entire plot in the first sentence, or perhaps even in their URL (www.i-hate-everyone.com).

Even the TV industry faces a serious story deficit. Those prime-time police and hospital dramas cost a lot of money to make. Not so expensive, however, is Jay Leno walking out and doing a monologue. That's one reason he's moved to 10 p.m., five nights a week. (The most compelling stories on TV are now those crafted by reality-show producers who stitch together a narrative of who's backstabbing whom in pursuit of a prize. It's all in the editing.)

Good stories take time to craft. Good writers, editors, copy editors, photographers, etc., all expect a living wage. The real question in the months and years ahead is whether there's a business model that can support good stories. Norman Sims, journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst: "The great stories will survive. But the question is who's going to pay for them. . . . This is not fast food. This is slow food. And it's expensive."

'Thirst for gossip'

Story-loving isn't just culture; it's biology. The human brain has evolved in such a way as to enable the construction and comprehension of narratives.

"We experience our lives in narrative form," says novelist Jonathan Franzen. "If you can't order things in a narrative fashion, your life is a chaotic bowl of mush."

Roughly around the age of 4, psychologists say, the human child develops a "theory of mind." The child suddenly grasps that other people have feelings, thoughts, just like the child's own. From this great mental leap comes a secondary, almost accidental talent: We can get inside the heads of people whom we never actually meet except in stories. This is why fiction works. Who says Huck Finn, Pooh or Harry Potter aren't real? They seem real enough.

Steven Pinker, Harvard's guru of evolutionary psychology, says our interest in stories comes in part from a "thirst for gossip" -- we need insider information about our social world. Narratives give gossip shape and meaning. And stories let us experiment, safely, with novel social arrangements that might otherwise blow up in our face. Think of all the adultery literature. "The Scarlet Letter." "Madame Bovary." "Anna Karenina." Usually someone dies. Don't try this at home.

Pinker on fiction: "Fiction may be, at least in part, a pleasure technology, a co-opting of language and imagery as a virtual reality device which allows a reader to enjoy pleasant hallucinations like exploring interesting territories, conquering enemies, hobnobbing with powerful people and winning attractive mates."