Beware the ‘Storification’ of the Internet

Recently, during an ad break in the episode of Frasier I was watching, two commercials played back to back. The first, for United, wanted to tell me “the story of an airline,” which the commercial characterized as sci-fi, romance, and adventure, starring 80,000 “hero characters” otherwise known as employees. The second ad, for ESPN, argued that college football has everything that “makes for a great story”: drama, action, “an opening that sucks you in, a middle that won’t let you go, and a mind-blowing, nail-biting ending.”

There is a growing trend in American culture of what the literary theorist Peter Brooks calls “storification.” Since the turn of the millennium, he argues in his new book, , we’ve relied too heavily on storytelling conventions to understand the world around us, which has resulted in a “narrative takeover of reality” that affects nearly every form of communication—including