Storytelling has been a thing that has existed for years and years, and has become a tradition for many cultures. Many stories come from the act of sitting around a fire and telling a story to a group of people, who would then go to tell that same story to another group of people, or singular person; the cycle would continue, and that same story would eventually become famous and well-known—with some alterations, since the story would either be lost in translation, or someone would mis-remember a detail for something else and change some aspect of a character or concept. A well-known example of this type of storytelling comes from the epic poems The Odyssey and the Iliad, which are stories that were supposedly told verbally by the blind poet Homer.
Modernly, most of our stories are found online through the perspective of both credited sources, written in the format of physical and online books, as well as individuals who express these stories to the world. Since we have access to seeing stories online, we are exposed to a multitude of events and stories that are spread across the entirety of social media. Just as though it were told verbally around a campfire, sometimes there could be accidental misinterpretations of the story that can confuse people and make them wonder which version of the story is the truest.
Despite the different ways that storytelling has changed since the evolution and creation of technology, the effects of storytelling are still the same as they have always been. We still have emotional reactions to stories that we read or see on the internet (laughing when we see something funny or shocking, or crying when we read devastating news or connect with someone on a personal level); we still learn life lessons after reading a story about someone experiencing something firsthand, rather than learning them through fictionalized stories.
Even if we feel disconnected sometimes by how often we are on our phones looking though social media, there is still this feeling of connection when we read something that affects us to the point of gaining a reaction from it, or when we learn something new from a stranger that lives in an entirely different country. Social media is definitely exhausting in the way that we learn about so many things at once, but there is some reward when we see something uplifting, or learn something that has benefited us and helped us grow as people.
“Campfire” by jeff.souville is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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