Story-telling is old. My guess is that it dates back to our first efforts at domesticating fire. The camp fire afforded us "leisure time" after nightfall for the first time ever. Imagine all of us pre-verbal, proto-humans huddled around a fire, faces awash in the red glow, staring at each other, for hours...

The context was ripe for language. And for story telling.

We learned, were cultured, and were entertained by stories in that ancestral environment. We made sense of the world through story-telling. It was all inherently social, passed from one person to another. The social fabric of "the tribe" was the content medium; social was the only content channel in town.

Fast forward 50,000 years or so to present day. Our stories are now impeccably-produced, high-definition TV shows, movies, music, beamed around the planet at the speed of light, blanketing 6+ billion people in the blink of an eye. With the swipe of a finger, I can instantly access one of 10 million stories available, anytime, anywhere. No fire required.

And no tribe required, either.

I believe we lose something when social is not part of the content experience:

• We are left to our own devices to make sense and find meaning in the story.
• We are muted in our ability to express our emotional response to it. 
• We miss the opportunity to bond and deepen relationships around shared interest in the story. 
• And we have no one we really trust to guide us through the endless maze of 10 million choices.

TV, movies, and concerts are more fun and enriching when experienced with others. And we give more weight to recommendations from friends than from strangers or algorithms. Hard to argue with these statements.

TV used to be naturally social. A few decades ago it was the "modern camp fire". Families congregated around it every night. And while the act of story-telling was no longer social, the experience of it certainly was social.

That has changed; the experience of content is becoming less naturally social. As more and more single-user content devices flood the market (iPhones, iPads, Kindles, etc), social experiences around content are either absent or dependent on technology solutions.

Imagine: mom, dad, Dick, and Jane, all huddled around the living room coffee table, faces awash in blue techno-light, staring at their individual tablet screens, completely unaware of each other, absorbed in non-intersecting realities.

Extreme, for sure. But I'm fairly certain that we're becoming more isolated via our new devices, and our need for integrated social technology and virtual social graphs will only increase as a result.