Shelf Life 🍣 Is face-to-camera dead? Four reasons it might be

And what might appear in its place as a storytelling device as we enter the post-fixed screen era

I recently had a conversation about the best way to solicit reader engagement for a project. In the past, mobile-visual and shortform—usually face-to-camera vertical video responses to well-crafted questions—had been hugely successful. But my hesitation on using this method now brought an unverified feeling sharply into the focus: face-to-camera feels a bit, well, dead.

Backup a little. We’re talking about the modern equivalent of the vox pop: journalists inviting community members to share their stories with you at scale. Voice of the people. If you worked in journalism in the noughties (that’s the aughts to your north American lot—a translation I learned recently from my Canadian buddy Blair which BLEW MY MIND)—you might still call it UGC. There are at least five reasons I think face-to-camera might be reaching its use-by date:

1. Just a gut feeling. Not the most convincing answer to start with, but over the years I’ve found that my hunch is usually a little ahead of the curve when it comes to new short-form storytelling and new media storytelling. If it’s played out in my mind, it’s probably played out in yours.

2. There are signs it’s been “done to death.” When the face-to-camera video gets its own pastiche and meme—in this case, known as the “millennial pause”— you know it’s tipped into the realm of uncool and on its way out. Read on to find out why:

Hell hath no fury like a Millennial scorned

3. The signs are in the times. The fact that face-to-camera now feels overdone makes sense. You only need remember why it felt so novel in the first place to find out why. Around late 2016 face-to-camera video took off shortly after Instagram launched Stories. Selfie mode gave the 10-15s videos, particularly from brands and media, a more humane feel. Why? Because before that, up close views of our jowly mugs had been reserved for friends and family only via FaceTime. So selfie view felt personal, exclusive, and all-access: like bringing the viewer into your bedroom. Suddenly a mode which was designed for private 1:1 communication could be used by brands to connect with thousands of potential customers. So its popularity as the mode of choice, for advertising, for community engagement, or any storytelling, exploded.

4. It’s making us sick. Fast-forward a few years, multiple lockdowns and a pandemic later and suddenly we suffer from zoom-fatigue, desperate at all costs to turn off self-mode camera whenever possible. It no longer feels personal. Plus, we have TikTok, a platform built almost entirely out of selfie-mode videos. Add that to news avoidance, as detailed in the summer 2022 Reuters Institute report (the biggest annual report in global media consumption), and we realise that re-finding that trust factor in the formats we choose for storytelling is more important than ever.

So, if Covid, TikTok and media overwhelm killed selfie-mode, what would I do now to engage people with stories in a multi-media way which still feels personal and human? Well, what do you still only really do with friends and family? Enter: the voice note.

We are just about still within the best-before dates of voice-note sharing. One-minute-thirty recordings of chit-chat which can transport the listener to your surroundings in an instant, give a complete vision of someone’s character, and catapult you into the realm of strong human connection.

Voice is a more reliable way to express oneself than text. Silke Paulmann of Essex University’s psychology department, says: “Vocal cues alone can communicate our internal state (emotions, attitudes, motivations) without the need for additional words.” When we hear people talk, she says, any “discrepancies”, such as someone who insists they’re fine but doesn’t really sound fine, “can be picked up within a couple of milliseconds” forcing the listener to “re-evaluate” the message.

—the Guardian

For this reason, I’d plump for gathering community stories with voice replies, voice notes and voice recordings. Apple’s microphone is better than ever, and most apps now support shared voice notes which can be saved, and even mashed up into this little soundscape my very talented friend and sound artist Benedict Mortimer did for me when I worked at an micro-podcast startup a few moons ago:

Examples?

• Beams, a startup I worked with a couple of years ago, makes use of voice replies to allow companies to collect customer feedback, like these coffee reviews;

• Cappuccino allows friends to micro-podcast together and teams to engage in out-of-office water-cooler conversations to help them gel. I used this for work in 2020 and loved it!

• Podcast usage is growing again after COVID-19 pause, according to the 2022 Reuters Institute digital news report, while a wider shift to audio continues to be driven by new voice interfaces and smart-tech devices.

What else would I use today to collect user stories?

• Postcards! Or anything with handwritten. Make sure the question you ask is perfect, send people a blank postcard, and the responses will always surprise you (we did this with an early version of Dear Vogue here, and the BBC documents a brilliant example from a London card-shop owner asking for lockdown secrets here…)

• Film stills. Film has long been back in fashion, and Dispo and digital cameras are invoking a renaissance in waiting-for-images. Gigi Hadid and others show that disposable cameras can tap into that personal, behind-the-scenes quality, even pre-90s babes will enjoy.

• A good ol’ text. Nothing says “weirdo human multi-tasking” more than a hurridly-written message sent on the fly complete with clipped vowels and typos. Rushed text messages will always out-pip the pressures of robots trying to make our sentences better (and usually longer) via auto-correct and grammarly. Make it more human: ask for short texts to a private number, and see what comes back.

With the possibility of a post-fixed screen third era of technology on the horizon (or already here), it’s quite likely the way we tell and share stories will soon go through another huge transformation. What remains consistent? People want to tell and share their stories.

Stories exist beyond the physical realm and inspire ideas and there will always be people’s stories to be shared. . We want to feel represented and need to see more than just celebrity and success, we want all the nuances of stories that diversity and variety can provide. 

Being able to tell and share the stories of other people enables them to feel heard, to feel seen and have their existence acknowledged. In a world which is increasingly disconnected and fragmented, stories bring hope, healing and change. I plan to go deep on this in Tell Their Stories, the paid arm of this newsletter, launching soon. To stay in the know, upgrade your subscription now.

What cool projects have you seen recently making use of voice notes, postcards or texts for inbound stories? Is face-to-camera dead as a storytelling device? What medium do you solicit community stories? Let me know, in a comment below!

Writing news ✍️ // On realising your ambitions

This week I completed, or at least finished the current draft of, my second novel HARD RESET. I wanted to tell you more about it, but if this isn’t your thing, skip to my reading and listening recommendations below…

I started writing this second novel in 2019. Fast forward three years, multiple redrafts, seven (wonderful) beta readers, and five versions later (plus this week’s hurdle of one long-ass gruelling 105k-word copyedit), I finally feel I’ve reached a good place with it. That is to say, I’ve got it as far as I can on my own.

Like any good writer, I know I need readers—specifically editors and wordsmiths—to help my writing get it to where I want it to go. I’ve never been used to writing in a vacuum. As a journalist, I am more comfortable having editors rip apart my writing to shreds—I actually crave it. My work for brands is usually read by readerships in the thousands. At Instagram it was the millions. Compared to my usual world of instant online reaction, writing a novel has felt a bit, well, quiet.

But so many things have kept me going. Namely, the deep sense of urgency I have about the subject matter (more on that below). And little boosts of encouragement from the few readers I’ve had: a HUGE thank you to my early readers: Mel, Robin, Ruth, Sonia, Liz, Caroline & Jacky, Hannah and Hayley.

In early 2020, I was accepted onto a writing residency on the Isle of Eigg in the Scottish Inner Hebrides, where research for the off-grid section of HARD RESET took place. That was a tipping point. After that week—my novel was growing as fast as the little girl in my tummy (now a bouncing toddler!) and I couldn’t turn back.

I can write anywhere, but with this view from the Eigg bothy was one of my fav all-time spots — and where a huge amount of the novel research started.

In 2021, desperate to recover my writing practice after having a baby, I took two Curtis Brown Creative courses and an Arvon writing course in my evenings. It was on the Arvon course I had a jolt of reality strike about my ambitions. And I wanted to share them with you here. Ever since my first novel, I’ve been kidding myself that I only want to write because I get a huge amount of joy in creative writing. Which is true. Nothing else transports me to such a fun place of made-up worlds, allowing me to turn complex questions around in my mind through my characters.

My Arvon tutor Sharon Duggal taught me to take my work (yes she called it work) seriously. I was complaining to her about how I had to cram my creative writing into the two-hour nap my daughter took on a Tuesday and I wanted more time. She was the absolutely right person to speak to. She had written an entire novel while juggling two newborn twins, their older sibling, as well as a freelance job, and a publisher deadline. The only thing holding me back from writing more was me: because I wasn’t being true to myself about my ambitions. Yes, I enjoyed writing. Innately so. But my frustration was because I knew if I just kept it up at two hours a week, I wasn’t likely to ever be read.

It sounds so simple, that a writer wants to be read. But many writers will tell you the opposite. In fact people, in my writing groups, people really struggle to share their work.

Why do I feel such an urgency around this book? Because I feel I have something important to say.

Striding towards my ambitions on Eigg

I realised this ambition the other day had a physical aspect to. Every single time I walk past my local bookshop, I picture my book in the shop window. They stock books like local writers and this vision has kept me going. It’s not a totally egotistical ambition—and certainly not about celebrity (which I’d hate). It’s about my work being available, being purchased and, yes, being read. I’m not under any illusion about this commercial factor, about wanting to keep all facets of my writing my trade.

My gorgeous local bookshop, Barton Books.

So this week, during a planned time away from the usual work (which in truth is the only time I’ve found I can really get into a writing project. If you want more on the process of when the hell and how I find time to write—and have a job and raise a tiny human in a pandemic—let me know in the comments and I’ll easily whip something up on this!), I started querying my second novel, HARD RESET. I can’t share more of it here, because I decided to go down the trad publishing route for all the reasons listed above. But here’s the pitch, in case you’re interested (with thanks to Courtney Maum and her awesome Substack Before and After the Book Deal, which helped me find the logline/pitch I landed on):

HARD RESET is a Black Mirror-esque exploration of what it would take for a group of high profile influencers to dismantle the most powerful social media app in the entire world. If 1984 was set in the next 10 years, it might look like this.

(And for any writers here struggling with their one-line pitch, this post is an absolute must-read.)

In the Ray household, we’re pretty big on celebrating the small steps and not just the trophy successes. So here’s a little celebration on getting to this stage with novel #2. I couldn’t have got here without reams of support from a humongous bunch of supporters who one day I hope to thank in an acknowledgements page. This week though: Mr Ray and Morrab Library—my beautiful workspace—were integral.

Top tip: surround yourself by published female writers as I did in the Elizabeth Treffry room at Morrab library while you hit “send” on your manuscript!

what I’m reading 📚 //

Shortform: The New York Times created this beautiful (and shocking) visual narrative story The New World: Envisioning Life After Climate Change, by David Wallace-Wells.

(Note, I actually think this is best viewed on mobile!)

Longform: The Wicker Man by Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer: I started reading this as part of my copyediting rabbit hole this week—as a beta reader suggested it as a comparative title since a large middle chunk of my novel is set in the Inner Hebrides. I hadn’t expected to get entirely sucked into this hard-boiled detective fiction. Partly because it was written in the 1970s, and the writing and dialogue is so so wild. If you like Ursula K. Le Guin, Raymond Chandler and noir, you might just like this.

Next I’m happily going to dig into something radically away from my own writing genre. Recommendations welcome!

what I’m listening to //

Subtraction as a Solution / How to Build a Happy Life

I don’t usually listen to self-help podcasts, but this one is about maths and philosophy more than therapy. I LOVED this idea of stripping away our to-do list to have a calmer, more daily life. Fortuitously, I listened to this podcast last week, as well as reading this excellent comic by Sophie Lucido Johnson about doing just 5 things.

So I could employ both theories this week, with my week off. And managed to tick ALL FIVE things off my to-do list (number one being copyediting my novel), and leave some padding room either side for daydreaming, long beach walks, and unexpectedly getting a nasty cold. Highly recommended listening!

What are you reading and listening to this week? Leave a comment below!