Social Networking Fiction

Social networks are in essence a place to tell a story. It’s the story of your life, told in such a way that you can share it with your friends and family. Whether you’re typing it out a few characters at a time on twitter, or posting pictures of the weekend on facebook, the point is to tell your own life story through a variety of media options.

The next step in using these social networks is to tell not a real story, but to document the life of a fictional character. Through the use of status updates, pictures, videos, and blog posts, you can actually record the day to day life activities of someone that you made up.

Taking this further, its possible to create a community such as the one found at RolePages.com, or on some of the groups found on Bebo or Facebook, where everyone involved is a fictional character. In this way you can take the story to a whole new level, interacting with other characters and creating an original, multi dimensional, multi media storyline which can potentially stretch out infinitely in any direction.

The potential here is that your story doesn’t have to be static, living only on the page and in your head. Instead you can breathe life into it, allowing it to grow naturally, nurtured by a whole group of people rather than just the efforts of a single author.

The problem of course is that you don’t own this story anymore. It becomes a community project, equally owned by everyone who participates. This means you can’t control the outcome. You have some influence, depending on your contributions, but the final story is a chaotic mishmash of random input from every person that participates.

Social networking represents the cutting edge in fictional storytelling. It is a collaborative process that allows you to develop stories that span multiple dimensions and media forms. While it is still in its infancy, it is on its way to becoming a major force in the world of storytelling.

This article was written by Jim Slate on behalf of the worlds first in character roleplaying social network This is a community dedicated to the telling of fictional stories, through the submission of pictures, videos, blogs, forums, and the creation of unique groups.