Designing your story: Who are you writing for? And, the truth about context collapse
How defining your reader from the outset can be just as valuable as knowing who you actual reader is later
Hello friends and welcome back to another installment of Tell Their Stories.
if you’re catching up, take a look at where we’re at in the TTS toolkit below. This week, we’re getting into the weeds of designing a story project which builds community inherently, and it all starts with knowing your reader.
Let’s get to it!
Stories start with readers
I’m not a consumer of tabloid news, but I’ll say this for tabloid journalists—they know their reader, through and through.
As a young journalism student we poured over print editions of The Daily Mail, and The Sun, marvelling at this skill: the writer knew their target reader and they knew which facts, stories and ideas would appeal to them, and the exact language they should use to hit home the information and reinforce brand narratives.
Most marketing campaigns fall flat at this first hurdle. They don’t take time to investigate their desired audience, and match it against their actual reader.
But all good storytelling projects—whether a charity campaign, or a yoga studio newsletter—start with the reader.
Here’s why.
We join communities to find a deeper sense of belonging—and telling (and reading) stories is a way to enrich and deepen those connections which forge that sense of belonging;
Readers feel a stronger sense of belonging when they connect with each other—not just the brand or writer. Your stories/posts/threads are the spaces they connect.
Peer-to-peer reader connections is what creates communities around storytelling projects which are as strong as they are deep as they are engaged. Ultimately, communities that endure. It’s how movements also start, and fandoms, and clubs.
As mediums for storytelling have evolved, so have our abilities to speak to more than one reader. Diaries, transcripts, manuscripts and haikus do not necessarily have more than one nameable reader in mind. Which makes their job somewhat easier. Online storytelling projects can reach nameless millions. Which is why stories online can be so powerful, and yet that power makes them harder to get right. As we will learn now…
Context collapse and the problem with online storytelling
The problem with storytelling once you get to social media—plotting content strings onto a friend graph—is a phenomenon occurs called context collapse.
In the first decade of Facebook, the platform asked you to update your status in the third person, active voice. (“Hannah is dying inside.”) When it flipped the switch to broadcast to newsfeed it caused uproar, even when the platform was still being using in colleges only. Twitter asked you to share “what’s happening” with the entire world, in a sentence or less, and Wordpress had the simple and effective template copy; “Hello, world,” now a familiar refrain to of the social internet.
The architecture of social media platforms—how they were fundamentally built—facilitates a single user reaching a multiplicity of audiences. The share model is 1:many, not 1:1. What’s more, for most platforms the follower mechanism doesn’t force reciprocal follows‚ only Facebook required you to both “friend” each other which was a forcing function to say who the receiver of your content should be. Even then, people cringed at the idea of the one:many personal post. On most platforms, that “many” is likely to be a bunch of people you don’t know.
But real humans don’t work this way. The simple analogy is of a couple returning from honeymoon. A group of close friends ask how was it? and might get a salacious or funny story, the family dinner might get a more buttoned up retelling, the work colleagues a swift highlight. We alter the way we tell stories for the intended audience, and we change the details, the tone, the format and the medium for each group. We are used to shape-shifting between the identities we have created among different groups of people in our lives, storytelling online is no different.
Content collapse is the icky feeling you get when you think you are writing for one audience, only to find out your readership includes another—the friend who texts after seeing a tweet to see if you’re OK. There was a short notorious window when quite a few average non-celebrity folks were being fired when bosses read their tweets. Can you write for all audiences? Friends, family, colleagues, and “the reader”? I think life is easier when the answer is NO.
Share freeze is a common response to the way social media conflates these identities. We become too aware of the boss, the partner, the close friend, the international peer, reading our content, that we decide to avoid posting altogether.
That’s why most people who have had the unfortunate experience of going viral will tell you it’s mostly horrible. This Embedded article goes into the details of why, but it can be all laddered up to this context collapse. People start consuming your content who weren’t intended. The writer becomes aware. It all feels gross.
I still get this when an IRL person in my sleepy coastal town tells me they started following me on Instagram. Sometimes people are open about it (“I stalked you on Instagram, I didn’t know you were into XYZ”) but more recently a friend I hadn’t seen for a while suggested she’d read a recent Substack post of mine, but she didn’t say so outright. And I felt too ashamed to ask. So we just danced around it. What made both these experiences feel disarming is that I didn’t expect either to be the audience of my posts—on Insta or on Substack.
Taylor Lorenz explained it well in her recent conversation with Hamish McKenzie in The Active Voice podcast:
I think having it so that everyone default-posts publicly to the entire world is crazy. We should probably not have that and make it so that things are more ephemeral. Make it so that you can really control your environment and who you want to speak to and make it easier for people to ... for you to find the audience that's interested in what you have to say and doesn't just get sucked into your haters.
This post from Galaxy Brain goes deeper into platforms and context collapse, if you find yourself curious to know more…
Knowing your actual reader and letting them shape the project
So how can we apply what we know about context collapse to our storytelling project. Large or small.
There are two types of audience we are talking about here: the desired audience, and the actual. (Don’t forget, when we speak of audience here it’s because we are talking about an amorphous unknown, once you actually get to know your readers, they become your community, as we discussed here.)
How do you define the desired audience?