Crowdsourced Storytelling explores how platforms like Anheuser-Busch’s custom craft beer model apply to narrative creation, where audience feedback refines genres—ghost stories, thrillers, or conspiracy theories—by prioritizing engagement over accuracy. Competing with CNN, BBC, and Reuters, reality-based storytelling struggles, defaulting to sensationalism: flat Earth claims, depopulation vaccines, or a "spoiled rich boy" battling the deep state. This feedback-driven escalation risks distorting truth unless corrected, reshaping stories into detached, extreme fantasies. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that will have theme music.
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I'm Spencer, your host, and it's just me today hoping that the strange idea in my head makes sense.
Crowdsourcing is the process of using a lot of different people, all adding a little bit of effort to accomplish a large task.
All manner of things has been crowdsourced since the internet has come about.
Inventions, apps.
Anheuser-Busch crowdsourced the creation of a craft beer tailored to the taste of its customers.
Today's topic is crowdsourced storytelling.
Imagine a large group of people all attempting to create a story using crowdsourcing.
It's free form, so they aren't required to take turns or anything.
Some of them add more to the story and some add less.
Some don't add any words at all, but simply judge the pieces of the stories added by others.
As this process continues, a pattern begins to emerge.
Some things that are added to the story are appreciated more than other things that are added.
This is inevitable, of course.
But exactly which things get appreciated says a lot about both the storytellers and the audience.
This is why we have stories of distinct types.
Ghost stories told around a campfire.
Thrillers, true crime, romance, fantasy.
In every case, the type of story needs an appreciative audience.
And feedback from that audience can affect how the subsequent or future stories are told.
No one appreciates a story they can't understand.
And they greatly appreciate a story they both understand and can deeply relate to.
The audience listening to a ghost story at a campfire wants to be frightened.
They want that edge of fear while they speculate about the world that can no longer see just outside the lighted area of the fire.
Each type of story has its own audience, and that audience helps to shape the subsequent stories by showing their appreciation for the current stories.
When storytellers take a chance on a new kind of twist or a variation on a theme, they run the risk of not having their story liked as much as the tried and tested twists and variations.
This is why we get pulp fiction that churns out words on a well-known formula, and why we celebrate the authors who took a chance with a new variation that eventually others copy.
This is the shape of fiction, forever entwined in a dance between storytellers and audiences.
Circling back to the internet and our crowdsourced story, the primary currency online isn't book sales or dollars earned.
It's actually attention and engagement.
A great deal of effort has been put into measuring down to the tenth of a second how long each person spends looking at each thing and how often they return to look again.
Social media companies have, of course, attempted to commodify our attention.
So much so that some of these social media companies have been sharing their revenues with content creators based on the engagement numbers.
The social media companies need to encourage the popular content creators to keep drawing eyes to the screen over and over again.
So we have crowdsourced stories, tales that people tell to entertain audiences.
Fiction is all well and fine, but it's actually fairly difficult to write engaging fiction that holds audience attention.
Also, online content creators that would attempt to create known fiction or fiction that everyone knows is fiction that's good enough to draw a returning audience would be in direct competition with television and movie creators who have much higher budgets and can afford to hire professional writers and actors to accomplish the task.
Also, reality always has an advantage over fiction in that it's potentially consequential.
It has the ability to influence the decisions of people.
One would think that a storyteller that wanted to tell a story about reality would have a similar problem as the storyteller who wanted to tell a fictional story.
I mean, the reality storyteller would have to compete with the news agencies, right?
CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBC, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, etc., etc., all have much larger budgets with which to send reporters to places to find out what is really happening.
Each one of those above mentioned wanting to become the truth-telling source that the audience will come to rely on for gaining knowledge about the world and current events.
This would be a problem if the crowdsourced storyteller were at all interested in being factually correct.
It takes a lot of effort to get the stories as accurate as the mainstream news usually gets them.
Generations of journalists competing with each other for stories engaged in that same proverbial dance with an audience that was sincerely interested in the stories that were most true generated a culture of journalistic ethics.
A system to train and support journalists in their quests for the best and most accurate stories.
But it takes surprisingly little effort to make up a convincing explanation of a handful of readily available facts.
And this is where we are.
What we tell stories about and what sorts of things we include are very culture dependent.
To have a storyteller relate a tale of a zubalogork that grundles under the harmy bee would do no good to anyone because those are nonsense words that I just made up.
The elements of the story must be things that the audience already knows and recognizes.
It's in this way that stories are built on the shoulders of previous stories that themselves worked to develop and communicate concepts and ideas.
Familiarity is wrapped into an imaginary space in the mind of a storyteller who repackages it into a new plot line.
If that plotline takes hold in the minds of the audience, that is, if the storyteller has properly threaded the needle between the familiar and the newly original, it might become a new idea that itself eventually becomes familiar to the audience.
After that, a new storyteller can take that newly familiar idea and try new variations with it that the audience can duly judge.
The easiest stories to tell are those which have the most easily recognizable elements.
We can all tell stories about tables and chairs and the ordinary mundane happenings of a lazy Saturday afternoon, but we all also know that no one else would listen.
So if we're telling a story that's going to hold someone's interest, we need to make it exciting.
Crowdsourced storytelling is unique among storytelling traditions in that everyone's version is necessarily very similar to everyone else's.
They're all telling slight variations of the same story.
Often they aren't even telling an entire story, but merely adding one new component and assuming that the audience has kept up with all the preceding parts of the story so far.
In such a space, it can be difficult for a prospective storyteller to distinguish themselves.
Let's keep in mind that the primary objective of each storyteller is to become noticed.
To become a storyteller, slowly adding bits to a crowdsourced story puts you in direct competition with thousands of would-be storytellers, all clamoring to add their own little bit, their own unique plot twist for which they hope to be rewarded with some of that sweet, sweet attention.
So how do you get yourself noticed in that space?
How does one stand out?
How does one consistently add new pieces to the story and be sure that their pieces are noticed and appreciated?
One could become more skillful, but that takes a great deal of effort, so very few go that route.
On the other hand, a much easier way to get attention is found by making the story more extreme.
Keep in mind that if the plot of the story takes a sharp turn too quickly, then the audience won't follow along.
Getting the attention of the audience by going to a new extreme must be done in small steps.
Add a new part to the story that is only a little bit more extreme than the story thus far.
By paying close attention to the story as it evolves, an audience member can properly keep track of the plotline as it evolves from the mundane to the extreme.
When one leaves a story behind for a time and returns to it, one can become very disoriented at how the story has gotten to this new plotline that doesn't seem to relate to anything that was happening previously, but also seems completely implausible to have reached at all.
So we have many storytellers all working together to tell a story.
We have a tendency for that story to be ostensibly about reality, but actually mostly fiction.
We have each storyteller adding their own piece to the existing story.
We have the pieces they add needing to be both familiar to the audience and also unique enough to get attention.
We have the unique parts that are added to the story tending to be extreme so that each storyteller can stand apart from the other more vanilla storytellers.
We have, therefore, the story tending to evolve outward in incrementally small steps that are palatable to the audience that pays close attention toward ever more extreme plot lines.
And we have these stories reaching ever more complicated, unrealistic, and completely implausible conclusions.
What sorts of completely implausible things have been wrapped into the crowdsourced story?
Try a flat earth on for size.
Or how about a plot by an unnamed group of rich people who want to depopulate the planet using a vaccine that only kills the people who are compliant enough to take it?
Maybe you could keep up with a plot of a story of a spoiled rich boy who grows up to be a flagrant philanderer and then gets backed by the most staunchly religious people to save the world from the quote-unquote deep state.
We have the chance now to put these stories back on track or let them be the end of us.