Digital and social storytelling

by bam

Every other form in this series gets an audience that has already agreed to pay attention. This one does not: attention is re-earned every few seconds, by someone holding a phone, sound off, mid-scroll, who did not choose your story and can leave at no cost. This course teaches what that constraint does to structure rather than what any platform currently rewards. The cold open and why the first three seconds are a structural problem and not a trick, the loop, designing for sound-off, the algorithmic middle that stands between a maker and an audience, serialization and the promise a series makes, comments as part of the text rather than a reaction to it, the ethics of a form built for spread including the corrections problem, and what survives a platform's death. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, with platform specifics labeled and dated because they are the part that rots.