NEW YORK: Once upon a time, there was a brief outage on some social media platforms. It got fixed. The end. On the face of it, kind of a boring story.But the widespread attention given to the blanking of Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger platforms on Tuesday suggests another, perhaps less obvious tale: the one that shows that social media platforms, like the books or newspapers or insert-medium-here of other times in history, matter more than just being entertaining pastimes.Wait, you mean those posts from that cousin you rarely see, sharing updates from her kids’ lives? That reel from the influencer, introducing you to a culture or bit of knowledge you never knew? That photo collage you put up as a memorial to a loved one whose loss you’re grieving? The back-and-forth debate between people on your feed trying to one-up each other on topics that interest you?Yes. The technologies might be recent. But the things we use them for? That taps into something age-old: Humans are wired to love stories. Telling them. Listening to them. Relating to each other and our communities through them. And, of late, showing them to the world piece by piece through our devices — so much so that one of Instagram’s primary features is called, simply, “Stories.”“Our narrative capacity is … one of the best ways through which we are able to connect with one another,” says Evynn McFalls, vice president of marketing and brand at the NeuroLeadership Institute, a consultancy that incorporates neuroscience into its corporate work. “Our brains like stories because it makes it easier for us to understand other people, other circumstances.”SOCIAL MEDIA AS A COMMUNITY OF STORIESIn his book “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human,” scholar Jonathan Gottschall says this: “The human imperative to make and consume stories runs even more deeply than literature, dreams and fantasy. We are soaked to the bone in story.”And in these times, social media is so often where they’re told — whether in pictures, videos, memes, text threads or mashups of all four. People can get news and information (and OK, yes, misinformation) there, learn and possibly sympathize with others’ plights, see things in ways that help us make sense of the world. We tell our own stories on them, make connections with others that might not exist in any other space.In many ways, these social spaces are where we do “human.”“It’s almost impossible for many people, especially in the United States, to think about their lives and communication without thinking about social media,” says Samuel Woolley, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media.
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