META AND THE FUTURE OF STORYTELLING: REIMAGINING NARRATIVE IN THE AGE OF THE METAVERSE AND GENERATIVE AI

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1. Introduction Storytelling is among humanity's oldest practices, and every major shift in media technology — oral tradition, manuscript, print, cinema, broadcast television, the networked screen — has reorganised how narratives are made, shared, and received (Ong, 1982; Manovich, 2001). The current shift may be equally consequential. In October 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta Platforms, committing publicly to building "the metaverse" — an immersive, embodied successor to the mobile internet — while simultaneously placing generative AI at the centre of its products through Meta AI and the Llama model family. This dual pivot toward immersive environments and generative AI has significant, under-examined consequences for storytelling. This paper asks: how are Meta's platforms and technologies reshaping the form, production, and reception of narrative, and what does this mean for storytelling's future as a cultural and educational practice? "Storytelling" is treated broadly, following narratology, as any structured representation of events experienced by an audience (Ryan, 2001) — spanning social-feed posts, transmedia fiction, VR experiences, and AI-co-authored fiction. Four objectives guide the paper: (i) tracing the evolution of platform-based everyday storytelling; (ii) analysing the narrative affordances and limits of Meta's immersive-reality initiatives; (iii) examining generative AI's implications for authorship and personalisation; and (iv) considering the pedagogical and ethical stakes, especially for adult and continuing education. Keywords: Metaverse, Digital Storytelling, Meta Platforms, Immersive Narrative, Generative Artificial Intelligence, Transmedia Storytelling, Virtual Reality, Media Literacy

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Conclusion and Future Directions Meta's transformation from social network to self-described metaverse-and-AI company is a revealing case study of a broader shift in storytelling's infrastructure: from authored transmission toward algorithmically curated, increasingly embodied, progressively AI-co-created narrative experience. This shift is well underway at the everyday-platform level (Section 4), emergent but constrained at the immersive-spatial level (Section 5), and rapidly accelerating at the generative-AI level (Section 6) — with significant, under-theorised consequences for education and culture (Sections 7–8). Future research should pursue: empirical studies of narrative reception and well-being in immersive/AI-mediated environments; comparative analyses across linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts; and pedagogical frameworks — particularly within adult and continuing education — equipping learners to critically navigate and creatively participate in a storytelling ecosystem only partly authored by human hands. The future of storytelling will be defined less by any single technology than by the evolving relationship between human narrative agency and the computational systems that increasingly curate, shape, and co-author it.

Institutions

• Bangabasi Morning College

  West Bengal, Kolkata

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