Why Social Media's Future is Feature Length

The unexpected shift from viral clips to narrative storytelling (and why early adopters will win big)

This might be my most controversial take on this Substack, because I’m going to make some big predictions on the future of self-distribution platforms based on spurious evidence.

In other words: I’m going out on a limb for this one. But I swear I actually believe this stuff and I’m not just trying to stir up shit.

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I’ve spoken at length about how the entertainment industry is undergoing a fundamental restructuring in the creative power dynamic.

I’ve discussed why waiting for permission from gatekeepers is no longer the shortest path to success in entertainment.

And I’ve talked about the common misconceptions creatives have about self-distribution and how the cycles of history inform why I think these zany thoughts and write these zany words.

Today I’m going to tell you why I think long-form narrative content is headed to user-generated and social media platforms in the near-ish future, and why those at the leading edge of this insight have the most to gain.

But first, let’s talk about stories.

Why Stories Are Here to Stay

I’ve heard countless people lament social media and UGC platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube as a death knell for storytelling. They argue that soon, thanks to humanity’s shortening attention spans, people will lose their appetite for real stories, and instead end up consuming an endless conveyor belt of mindless short-form slop.

Gone forever are Shakespeare, James Joyce, Kurosawa and Troufaut. In their place, the tech dopamine peddlers will feed us clones of Mr. Beast and Hawk Tuah Girl, and we’ll be forever doomed to an eternity of dance videos and dashcam footage.

Some people think we’ll never surpass this level on the story gauge. I disagree.

Not only do I think this viewpoint is overly pessimistic; I believe it overlooks a fundamental aspect of the human condition:

People need stories.

I don’t mean that people need stories to inspire them and lift them up (though they do). I mean societies and the people within them literally need stories and storytellers to prevent themselves from slipping into chaos.

Stories are how humans make sense of their world.

• Cognitive Psychologist Jerome Bruner argued that humans organize experience and memory primarily in narrative form, not through logic or category.

• In his The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall lays out research supporting the idea that human brains are literally wired for narrative - we can't help but create stories to make sense of random events

• Claude Lévi-Strauss argues stories consist of basic elementary structures across civilizations and that stories are a fundamental human need as opposed to a mere invention.

Divine Twin narratives, stories about great floods and the retrieval of loved ones from the underworld are all present in a number of ancient cultures that were geographically isolated from one another.

Some people credit aliens for this phenomenon.

But the truth is much more fascinating: These patterns are hardwired into our DNA, passed down from common evolutionary ancestors.

This idea of a universal subconscious was Carl Jung’s bread and butter.

This is your brain on stories. Some theorize that our brains have “back doors” that connect to others via a collective subconscious.

Dan Harmon (who also mentions Jung in his writing) captures the primal nature of storytelling when describing his story circle:

1: You. 2: Need. 3: Go. 4: Search. 5: Find. 6: Take. 7: Return. 8: Change.

Sounds like a caveman giving you an order. That's what it is. Behind (and beneath) your culture creating forebrain, there is an older, simpler monkey brain with a lot less to say and a much louder voice.

One of the few things it's telling you, over and over again, is that you need to go search, find, take and return with change. Why? Because that is how the human animal has kept from going extinct, it's how human societies keep from collapsing and how you keep from walking into McDonald's with a machine gun.

No matter how much you separate people across time and space, they will always crave stories told in a way that resonates with their primate brain.

If you deprive a human of stories by, say, emerging them in a sensory deprivation tank, guess what they’ll do?

They’ll make up their own stories. They’ll imagine entire vivid narratives played out in their head. It doesn’t matter if they’re a writer or an engineer or a delivery driver, because stories are biological, innate to the human animal.

This is the reason that all the world’s great religions have attracted so many followers: They tapped into people’s hunger for a good story.

And people are more starved for stories than ever. We need heroes. We need a journey into and a return from darkness. We need ambiguous endings that keep us up at night asking “Was Deckard a replicant?” or “Was Cobb dreaming at the end?” or “What the hell kind of ending was that, Game of Thrones?”

It’s the reason that blockbuster movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer and Deadpool & Wolverine still draw enormous audiences even as social media continues to swallow market share.

People tell stories, but more importantly, stories are part of people, and that isn’t changing any time soon.

Storytelling in 2025

Does that mean that people are going to abandon social / UGC and start returning in droves to traditional entertainment like features and TV series? Not in the near future.

So what then? If film / TV is losing ground to social / UGC, and people still need stories, where will they go to get them?

Sensory deprivation tanks.

Just kidding. Though this would be a great way to announce that I’m launching a line of sensory deprivation tanks for in-home use.

Where will people get the stories they so desperately need? Wherever they can find them.

There’s a reason that Barnes & Noble book stores are coming back in force after we all concluded the internet spelled the demise of the printed word. Yes, I’m aware of the irony that ‘BookTok’ was largely responsible for this comeback.

But apart from that resurgence in print literature, people seek out stories in news articles and viral ads and their favorite songs and real-life tales of redemption and hope.

Stories feed the soul and connect humans via their shared ancestry.

And just like junk food tricks the body into thinking it’s consuming nutrition by stimulating the right pleasure centers, the current landscape of social media and UGC does the same to our brains using basic storytelling structure. They feed people stakes and escalation and a descent into the unknown as a mechanism to stoke fear or trigger a quick dopamine response.

And when people go long enough without real, nourishing stories, they end up A: Losing their minds or B: Clinging to the closest thing to a story they can find. That’s how we get stuff like conspiracy theories. People need to make sense of their world. They’re desperate for stories to help them do so, so when one comes along, they latch on to it, no matter how nonsensical or toxic it may be.

I’d rather be Indie.

UC Berkeley Professor Timothy Tangherlini:

I think of conspiracy theories as narrative constructs, as fictional. And they can be very powerful because they are stories. Narratives are very efficient at encapsulating norms, beliefs and values — and when we tell them over and over, they get pared down to the most efficient kernel of narrative weight.

This is why narrative storytelling is important, and people are not getting their story fix from Hollywood. Diagnosing why isn’t the purpose of this post, but what is clear is that superhero movies aren’t cutting it anymore (Entertainment Strategy Guy discusses this with a bit more nuance in his latest piece) which explains why Marvel’s most recent success was more buddy comedy than traditional superhero fare.

The larger point is that there’s an appetite for deep, meaningful stories that’s going unfulfilled, and whoever figures out how to satisfy audiences is going to become a massively influential figure in shaping popular culture.

UGC as the Next Narrative Platform

Last post, I talked about how as a medium matures, it grows and eventually overtakes a legacy medium:

After 30 or so years of stage and film coexisting (1900’s-1930’s), films overtake plays as the dominant form of entertainment. Then TV shows up and after about 30-ish years of film and TV coexisting (1930’s-1960’s), TV surpasses film in popularity.

But as a medium evolves, so too does the content on that medium. Cheaply-created content gets more expensive, short-form content gets longer, and content goes from spontaneous and unstructured to scripted and story-like, with all sorts of narrative bells and whistles that scratch our hind brain in that good way.

The earliest films were merely demonstrations of the technology like Horse in Motion (1878), Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) and Train Arriving at La Ciotat Station (1896).

Soon, you began to see short staged scenes, such as L'Arroseur Arrosé (1895), a simple comedic sketch in which a gardener gets hose-pranked and then physically abuses a minor:

Family fun for all.

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The earliest narrative stories didn’t arrive on film until A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904), and the first feature-length film produced in the U.S. was 1909’s Les Miserables. And now, films are basically synonymous with narrative stories. Even non-fiction documentaries have complex narratives woven within them.

This evolution from non-narrative to narrative is evident across other mediums, like TV, which started primarily with news broadcasts, variety shows, and live events in the 1940s before evolving to include sitcoms like I Love Lucy and scripted dramas like Dragnet in the 1950s.

A more contemporary example, podcasts started primarily as a vehicle for talk shows, interviews, and news commentary in the mid 2000’s to early 2010’s until Serial marked a pivotal shift toward narrative storytelling. Now the medium includes highly produced fiction series (Homecoming, Welcome to Night Vale, Bubble, etc.).

And now, UGC / Social platforms are emerging as the latest medium to ride that narrative train. For a number of years, YouTube has proven a legitimate testing ground for young creatives to cut their teeth and showcase their storytelling skills (See Issa Rae, Quinta Brunson, The Human Giant, Lonely Island and so many others), and I believe this trend will continue and expand on YouTube and other UGC platforms as creatives from traditional media seek distribution outlets for their creativity.

UGC: A New Home for Creatives

It’s no secret that the last few years in Hollywood have been really, really rough. I talk about this at length in Greenlight Yourself Part 1:

Seasons are shorter, runs are shorter, rooms are smaller and hiring at lower levels is basically non-existent. At the time of this writing, I now know very few established writers who are working, let alone early-career writers.

Think about the smartest, most talented TV writer you know. Now imagine telling them they can no longer write for TV anymore. Do you think they would stop writing? Do you think they would give up on telling stories?

Fuck no. They would find a way to write, to create elsewhere: For the stage. For podcasts. For video games.

By the way, up until relatively recently, those last two were seen as places you went while you were in between TV jobs. Now, many viable creative careers are built atop them. And so shall it be in UGC / social.

All it takes is one breakout narrative hit from an establishment voice from film / TV, and then the floodgates will open.

It’s already kind of begun. We’re starting to see the proto-version of this with serialized micro-dramas from China that premiere in bite-sized chunks on TikTok. I anticipate it’s only a matter of time before these micro-dramas appear in the U.S. market in a very real way.

Exhibit B: Australian creators Danny and Michael Philippou graduated from Jackass-style YouTube videos to producing the horror feature Talk to Me that went to Sundance before being picked up by A24. While - to my knowledge - the film itself didn’t premiere on YouTube, the creatives behind it built their names and reputation on the platform.

Add to that Milk & Serial, a horror movie shot for $800 that had an audience in the millions and got write ups in major trades.

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In a press release that’s more manifesto than memo, Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti compared modern social platforms to crack and fentanyl and argued that there exists a huge appetite for real, uplifting stories to be told, citing a study in which people would pay money to have everyone get rid of social media.

This isn’t necessarily an indictment of the tech underlying these platforms, but a judgment of the content on those platforms. People crave real stories, and are emotionally malnourished after years of quick dopamine hits that hijack narrative devices to propagate.

There’s a huge gap between people’s appetite for real, nourishing stories, and what we’re fed on social platforms in 2025. Whoever bridges that gap has a ton to gain.

I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced that narrative storytelling is about to have an enormous resurgence, and UGC will be the vehicle that helps get it there, whether the dopamine peddlers like it or not.

Next time, we’ll either talk about the battle between fear and creativity OR strategies to get started making your projects come to life.

Up to you:

Stay tuned,

Jon