Understanding Storytelling in the Context of Information Systems

Storytelling has been used for a long time as a powerful communication tool. In the time of digital transformation storytelling is rediscovered on online platforms for e-commerce or crowdfunding projects. Digital storytelling is also increasingly used in the social media context, including online blogs, on Twitter or in the form of online reviews of services and products. Across all these digital settings, storytelling is used in order to transport a complex content more vividly to the audience and to ensure that the audience remembers the content as long as possible. In these digital forms of storytelling, textual description is frequently supplemented by digital elements like video, pictures or hypertexts. Recognizing importance of these developments, in this paper we provide an overview of existing studies on storytelling with a particular focus on information systems settings.