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As Technology Marches On, more aspects of everyday life can be conducted through Internet communication. People can search information, put up photos and documents, and speak with people from all over the globe.
While it's common to integrate the Internet into modern stories, some stories make the entire story, or at least a large portion of it, take place entirely online. For written stories, this can be as simple as writing dialogue in the format of text messages or emails chock full of exposition.
For visual storytelling, this is usually done with video calls, such as via Skype or Zoom. The Other Wiki refers to this genre of filmmaking as "screenlife" or "computer screen films".
Similar to Found Footage Films, this format allows for a lower budget as you just need several (digital) webcams set up to do long takes, and actors don't need to fly out to film in the same location–they just need to turn on their respective cameras and film their parts. Video conferencing provides an in-universe Split Screen that can capture characters in all sorts of locations, while allowing them to see each other at the same time. Even outside video calls, though, the entire screen just depicting the user interface for most of a visual work’s length, granting us the same perspective as if we were using the computer, fulfills this trope. Note also that the resulting works don't require that the footage in question be “findable”; a Zoom meeting which is not being recorded by anybody might not work in a found footage film (because nobody could plausibly find the footage) but would be acceptable for screenlife stories.
This method of filming came in handy during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic, when many television shows switched to screen-recorded shows as in-person production shut down. Computer games may use their interface to effectively simulate the experience of using a website or other digital program.
If this technique is used in comedies, expect a character who is Hopeless with Tech to botch up their side of the conversation, such as frequently disconnecting, accidentally adding a ton of special effects to their video conference, or forgetting to disconnect before saying or doing something embarrassing. More dramatic works also often, though not always, invoke the New Media Are Evil trope.
Subtrope of Painting the Medium. A Vlog Series of the ‘realistic flavour’ is a subtrope of this trope itself. Web Originals with No Fourth Wall fall under this trope only if resembling digital media is a deliberate style choice, not if it just happens to be digital media. (Therefore, a webcam-filmed series that includes substantial non-vlog content would not count.) A Scrapbook Story can be this if it is comprised of online documents. For a more traditional manner of conveying stories through messaging, see Epistolary Novel. Compare Deliberate VHS Quality, Pop-Up Texting, and Unbroken First-Person Perspective.
Examples:
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Advertising
- A Progressive ad campaign released during the COVID-19 pandemic shows Flo and her coworkers trying to conduct business over video call and failing. These include online screw-ups like Mara shit-talking Jamie and Flo while her mic is still on, the gang unconvincingly "passing" a tube of mustard through their video screens, and a whole lot of technical issues ruining the meetings.
- A Burger King ad, also released around the COVID-19 pandemic, has The Burger King video calling customers to show off the new 3-for-$3 meal deal.
- Google's most common advertising technique is to tell a story through a series of Google searches and their results.
- An ad for Microsoft Teams, a video conference program, showed healthcare professionals chatting on the program, praising how they can use it for work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- A series of Autotrader ads put out during COVID-19 showed customers conducting business with car dealers through video chat.
- A couple of Folger's coffee ads released during COVID-19 depict people struggling with video business calls, either ignoring their kid trying to get in the frame or forgetting to wear pants. They're only able to get through it because they have coffee.
- A Bob's Discount Furniture commercial had Bob promote "Bobfest 2021" to a group of children via video call.
- One of the Liberty Mutual "LiMu Emu and Doug" commercials had Doug and the emu communicate via video chat. Doug plays with several different filters, including one that gives him an emu head. This badly startles the emu, who pecks at its camera.
- A commercial for Frosted Flakes had Tony the Tiger video chatting Shaquille O'Neal over discussing who liked Frosted Flakes more (and then who had the deeper voice).
Anime & Manga
- Whenever the protagonists film a video in Kiratto Pri☆Chan, it's presented on-screen in the style of an Internet video, complete with appropriate banners.
Fan Works
- The Everyday Craziness in Pontypandy side story "Wellness Check-in" is portrayed as a computer conference call. It is written as a transcript, including silent actions from the characters and their log-in/log-out times.
- Gaige's ECHO Logs retells the events of ''Borderlands 2' in the form of the transcripts from Gaige the Mechromancer's ECHOnet podcast.
- The Alien fanwork Killing Elvis is constructed from emails, text messages, test logs, and future-Twitter feeds, detailing the testing and presentation of a not dead xenomorph.
- In the Motion Practice series, "The Eight-Hour Postponement" is told entirely in text messages.
- Scary News out of Tokyo-3 is told entirely in the form of a web-forum discussion, but due to the presence of several Intrepid Reporter characters, there are a few news articles and interviews sprinkled throughout, including interviews with some of the characters from the original work.
- The Sherlock fanfic The Shape I Found You In (login required) consists of e-mails and text messages between Sherlock and John while Sherlock is working a case in Sweden.
- Sorrowful and Immaculate Hearts series:
- "Anti-Social" is told in chat logs, Tumblr posts, and transcripts of YouTube and Snapchat videos.
- "Bad Publicity" is told entirely in tweets.
- "Gotham's Favorite Son" is a series of Tumblr posts.
- "Nominal" is told in chat logs and screenshots of Bruce Wayne's computer.
- Superhero RPF is told exclusively through fanfic synopses, forum threads, tumblr asks and reblogs, chat logs and other assorted internet communication.
- With Pearl and Ruby Glowing: Downplayed; the flashbacks in "A Story about the Goodest Guardian" from Stories About the Heat of the Heart consist partly of text from characters' Tumblr posts.
Films — Live-Action
- The Collingswood Story is an independent horror film told through the webcam footage of two college students, whose long-distance relationship gets complicated by a creepy online psychic. In terms of professionally distributed media, this is the Ur-Example; it was developed in 2000 and released in 2002, years before web communication was mainstream. As a result, most mainstream distributors were hesitant to release a film, and filmmaker Mike Costanza had to rely on the support of the online horror community.
- The Den (2014): This film is shown entirely from the perspective of the protagonist Elizabeth's webcam, cellphone, and GoPro.
- Four Sisters Before The Wedding: The framing device revolves around a Zoom call between the eponymous sisters and their brother CJ as they reminisce about their parents' marriage almost ending in 2003.
- Host: This film is a screencast of a Zoom call between friends who accidentally summon a demon and then try to get rid of it.
- Megan is Missing: Almost half of the film is shot from the perspective of screens, including notably Amy's camera as she is tortured and murdered.
- Mercy (2026) is largely told through screens. Chris is the prime suspect in a murder case and sits strapped to a chair in the Mercy Court chamber for most of the runtime, trying to Clear My Name by accessing surveillance footage, crime scene reconstructions, phone records, and social media posts through voice commands and touch-sensitive controls, all while communicating with the AI judge Maddox and coordinating police in the field via live video feeds. The few events that happen outside the chamber are almost always shown to Chris, and the audience, through the same digital interface.
- The short film Noah tells the story of a breakup entirely through the protagonist's computer screen.
- Open Windows: This film tracks the computer screen of a guy who is induced to hack a celebrity's cameras and cyberstalk her.
- Profile: The producer of Unfriended and War of the Worlds also produced this screenlife film, about an investigative journalist attempting to catfish her way into the terrorist group ISIS and uncovering a web of online lies.
- Ratter: Emma is secretly being monitored by a cyber stalker who has hacked into her phone, laptop, and other devices with a camera. Every angle is from a device with a camera that the stalker has hacked into (a cell phone, a laptop, a Kinect, etc).
- Safer at Home: This film is shown through the webcams of several couples who decide to have a virtual party during a pandemic lockdown.
- In Searching, as well as its sequel Missing, a man uses his phone and laptop to gain information; on his missing daughter in the original, and in the sequel, on his mother.
- The satirical horror film Spree follows a man named Kurt Kunkle whose obsession with social media stardom drives him to commit serial murders on camera. The film is made up of social media posts and livestreams from Kurt and the other characters.
- Unfriended is a horror thriller inspired by the Found Footage genre, depicting a character's laptop screen as her friends' Skype conversation is invaded by someone claiming to be their dead cyberbullied ex-friend, as viewed on webcams.
- Unfriended: Dark Web follows its predecessor in taking place entirely on a computer screen, except one of the computers in question belongs to a criminal empire that shoots snuff videos.
- Untitled Horror Movie: This film features six people filming themselves as they try to make a horror movie and accidentally summon an evil spirit. All footage is from the characters' webcams and phone cameras.
- Vlog tells the story with footage from Brooke Marks' titular vlog as well as her killer's web videos, but this is mixed in with traditional storytelling and footage from a true crime Show Within a Show.
- War of the Worlds (2025) takes place almost entirely on Will Radford’s work computer screen, with plenty of Zoom-style videoconferencing and news videos about the Alien Invasion and his defeat of the Government Conspiracy taking up the runtime.
- We're All Going to the World's Fair is about a teen who is obsessed with a YouTube based Alternate Reality Game. As such, some shots are staged from the perspective of the protagonist's webcam as they record videos, or show an entire video Casey is watching. These shots exist in addition to more traditionally-framed 3rd-person shots showing Casey watching a video and the video itself, or characters on a video call.
Literature
- The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl has some segments consisting of instant messaging logs between the characters.
- The Creepypasta Candle Cove was presented as a message forum thread discussing memories of the titular children's TV show.
- The Dionaea House is hosted on an in-universe website and told through a mixture of emails, site updates, and even blogs on other platforms. There are text messages and a few newspaper clippings mixed in, but they're the exception to the rule.
- Gena/Finn tells the story of two fangirls mostly through livestreams, fanfiction, internet comments, and Tumblr posts. The story does expand at times to include more epistolary forms, such as newspaper webpages, especially in Part Two, and text conversations, but the Internet is still Gena and Finn's main mode of communication.
- Towards the end of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the narrative halts to show a series of e-mails between Mikael Blomkvist and Erika Berger as they try to negotiate how to publish Blomkvist's exposé about a man who turns out to have had a seat on their paper's board of directors.
- Internet Crusader by George Wylesol tells a horror/fantasy story through screenshots of the protagonist using a Windows PC to communicate through turn-of-the-century web and messaging technologies.
- OMG Shakespeare is a series of books that rewrites William Shakespeare's plays as a series of text messages, complete with texting lingo.
- Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke is a novel told exclusively through the characters' Slack messages. Justified, as the protagonist's consciousness is trapped within his company's Slack server. It Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
- Downplayed in Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda; it is largely written in traditional prose, but the emails that Simon exchanges with his anonymous crush Blue make up a good chunk of the book.
- Train Man (2004) was based on a real-life internet message board thread; as a result, on the show, a significant amount of each episode takes place online, with Yamada enlisting fellow netizens to give him advice on everything from fashion to surfing to how to deal with a stalker.
- The ttyl Series tells the stories of three girls in high school (and later college) by chronicling their instant messaging logs, complete with Internet slang and emojis.
- The Joe Hill short story "Twitterings from the Circus of the Dead" is told through the Twitter account of a teenage girl, which quickly turns into an Apocalyptic Log when she and her family stop by at the titular Circus of Fear.
- Desmond Warzel's short story "Wikihistory" is presented as a series of posts on the Time Police's official online forum.
Live-Action TV
- All Rise: The first season finale had the cast communicating over video conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The 2019 miniseries Content takes place entirely across two smartphone screens.
- Everything's Gonna Be Okay, which is set just before the COVID-19 pandemic, occasionally employs computer screens to get around social-distancing protocols. For instance, one episode focuses on Genevieve trying to work up the courage to post her history vlogs online, and ends with her watching a video of her crush playing the guitar. Another episode has as its framing device Nicholas setting up a video chat with his mother in Australia so that he can keep her company as she undergoes surgery.
- The iCarly opening is made up like a video sharing website, fitting for a show about a webshow. Its Idiosyncratic Wipes are made the same way, and transition into a new scene by clicking on a video thumbnail. The revival series has a similar theme sequence, but with a social media video interface instead.
- During the COVID Pandemic, Impractical Jokers filmed a brief series of Dinner Party episodes via video group chat.
- Modern Family: "Connection Lost" takes place on Claire's laptop screen as she connects to her family on social networking sites while she waits for a flight home.
- Mythic Quest had a special COVID-19 episode released between seasons 1 and 2, presented and recorded through virtual meetings and FaceTime that showed the characters as they adjusted to life during COVID.
- A Parks and Recreation Special was released during the COVID-19 pandemic and has Leslie talk to her friends and do media interviews via Gryzzl video conferencing.
- Saturday Night Live employed this in a few sketches, especially during late Season 45 when they switched to making sketches from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic closing down studios.
- In one sketch, a business call goes south as the less-than-tech-savvy receptionists Nan and Henriette keep messing up their cameras.
- Another sketch showed a Zoom church sermon where the attendees embarrassingly kept their microphones on.
- The "My Brother Knows Everything" sketch is formatted as a tween girl's web show.
- The Billie Eilish episode in Season 47 focused on someone's cell phone scrolling through TikTok, occasionally switching over to iMessage where her dad is telling her to take out the garbage.
- Sesame Street released several special episodes styled to resemble Zoom calls during the COVID-19 pandemic:
- Elmo's Playdate is about Elmo holding a virtual playdate with his best friends.
- Elmo's World News focuses on Elmo holding a virtual news show about what families are doing during the pandemic.
- The ABCs of COVID-19 is a series of three virtual town halls held on CNN in 2020. The characters use Zoom to talk about contemporary events, including the pandemic, racism, and how to celebrate the holidays and help people in need.
- The Very Special Episode The Power of We had Elmo and Abby hold a virtual playdate with their friends Gabrielle and Tamir, where they talk about how to be anti-racist. At the end of the special, several more characters join the call to perform a song.
- Victorious:
- The episode "Wi-Fi in the Sky" focuses on Tori, stuck on a late flight from New York, doing a group project with her friends via an extensive video chat. However, there are scenes that take place in the airplane outside of Tori's laptop.
- The show transitions between scenes by showing Tori's status posts on in-universe social network "The Slap" describing the previous scene.
Music
- In "Sayonara End Roll" by Eve, most of the Animated Music Video takes place on the protagonist's phone, illustrating the depression he's going through through showing his camera, pictures, and social media. It's also done in a vertical phone aspect ratio.
Video Games
- Part of Cytus II's story (especially the first act) is told through posts and comments on the fictional social media site iM.
- The .hack R1 Games and the .hack//G.U. games take place within a fictional MMORPG called The World, and when you're not logged into it, the games also tell their story through simulated message boards, emails, and news sites.
- Ellie: Help Me Out... Please is a horror game wherein the player must view surveillance footage via a computer interface for extended periods of time.
- The Interactive Fiction game, Emily Is Away, spans a five-year period and takes place entirely on your 2000s-era computer, where you and the titular Emily talk via AIM. The Time Skips account for time spent at school, college, and other life, and you and Emily will often talk about times you've met up offline, but it's all on that screen.
- Experience 112 is a game where the player must spend significant chunks of the story viewing surveillance footage on a computer.
- Her Story is presented as the protagonist being given access to an old computer with a suboptimal program to access a video archive.
- Home Safety Hotline presents most of the action through a Windows 95-style interface as you take calls from people who are experiencing unusual phenomena and dig through your database to discover the cause, then send them the right info to deal with it.
- Hypnospace Outlaw tells its story through a fictional internet browser called Hypnospace, which allows one to use the internet while sleeping.
- Survive the Internet on The Jackbox Party Pack 4 is set up like a series of websites on which players post each other's prompts in new contexts, the goal being to make them look as stupid as possible.
- Needy Streamer Overload: The entire game takes place on a computer screen with an appearance reminiscent of Windows 95's operating system, as you play as the producer of the up-and-coming internet streamer OMGkawaiiAngel.
- Night Trap is stated that the player has hacked into the cameras and trap system for the house, showing a main camera display at the top, a choice of possible cameras at the bottom left.
- A Normal Lost Phone has an interface that looks like a phone and is where you'll be solving puzzles on it.
- The Operator: The whole game takes place on Evan's early-90s FDI computer.
- The Roottrees are Dead: The core mystery of the Roottree family history is uncovered using a '90s-era search engine and other online resources.
- SHENZHEN I/O is presented as you using a CAD program and email client to make electronic gizmos.
- While Sticky Business is a sticker shop simulator, you follow the stories of your regulars through their text messages.
- South Park: Phone Destroyer, a mobile game exclusive to smartphones, has a few scenes in story mode where characters appear to video call the player.
- There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension is presented as the player interfacing with a series of games.
- TIS-100 is presented as you using and reprogramming a found mysterious computer.
- Welcome to the Game: Most of the game takes place on a computer as you search The Deep Web to find pieces of the url that will let you access the Red Room. You occasionally have to get up from the computer to hide from the Kidnapper that is after you.
Visual Novels
- The majority of Blooming Panic is told through chat messages.
- Closed Hands has conventional visual novel scenes that are text-only, but a few scenes play out on a simulated computer desktop where there's a conversation on a chat app.
- A recurring trope in Christine Love's Visual Novels that are set in the same, unnamed universe:
- Digital: A Love Story: The entire game takes place on an Amie computer, via a browser and e-mail client.
- don't take it personally babe, it just ain't your story: The protagonist, Rook, is (discreetly) given complete and total access to the school's social networking service, including all of the private messages of his students. And using that service is required to progress the story at some points.
- The Hateful Days anthology/series: The player is accessing the computer logs of a ship that went off-course and now just contains of dead people and artificial intelligence, and discovers exactly what happened on it:
- Analogue: A Hate Story: Figuring out how the ship's occupants died, after going off-course.
- Hate Plus: Figuring out how the ship went off-course in the first place.
- Error143: The majority of the game is set on the protagonist's desktop as they chat with Micah.
- Killer Chat! takes place in the player character's Discord-like messaging app, where they text and make video calls.
- Mystic Messenger is structured as an instant-messaging app where the player can interact with other characters via text messages and phone calls.
- Operator's Side: The protagonist interacts with the only other survivor of a disaster via a security system to observe, and microphones to talk.
- In Psycholonials, the main character is a social media influencer so a lot of the story is told this way. The visuals show Z.'s social media feeds and posts, and the text shows transcripts of her text messages and social media DMs.
- Sex Advice Succubus is presented as an online chat service, and the story is told entirely through chat messages between Qmin and her clients.
Webcomics
- All the early dialogue in Homestuck is conveyed through instant messaging on fictional client Pesterchum and its various equivalents. The story gradually moved offline, but this dialogue format remained even when the characters talked in person.
- What Happens Next is the story of a number of more or less perpetually online Generation Z members embroiled in a controversial murder case and its aftermath. Accordingly, much of the comic consists of Tumblr posts, Kiwifarms threads, video calls, personal messages, and so on, either by the characters or about them.
Web Video
- Annie 96 Is Typing shows a horror home invasion story through a Whats App conversation between two teenagers, Annie 96 and Mc Davey.
- As Told By Emoji is a web series by Disney retelling their most famous movie plots in emoji form, entirely on a phone screen. Example here.
- The Autobiography of Jane Eyre: Based on Jane Eyre, the modern vlog series is told from Jane's perspective in vlog format, using her digital camera. In a few cases, other characters hijack her camera or she accidentally captures conversations by leaving the camera on when she thought it was off, accounting for some odd-angled videos. In some instances, Jane uses the videos as insurance in case something weird happens to her.
- Hardly Working features this trope in "Hardly Working from Home." During Hurricane Sandy, the staff has to work from home, but a video conference call quickly goes off the rails when it's discovered that nearly everyone in the meeting is fooling around: Sam is taking a bath, Owen and Murphy are facing off in an XBOX game, Streeter is chugging beers, Kelly has to deal with her shirtless boyfriend wandering into the shot and asking about peanut butter, Emily's "meemaw" shows up to ask how to open Solitaire, and Marina (who isn't even scheduled to be there) tells everyone to be quiet so she can film a separate unboxing video. Pat tries to keep everyone on task and scolds them for slacking, but proves himself a hypocrite when it's revealed he isn't wearing pants.
- The Lizzie Bennet Diaries: The series, a modern day vlog adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is shot entirely from the perspective of web cameras. The main series is shot from Lizzie Bennet's camera as she runs a vlog as part of her graduate thesis project, and any events that occur offscreen are discussed or playacted by the characters on camera. Lizzie's sister Lydia and Charlotte's sister Maria start their own vlogs showing certain events from their perspectives, and Gigi hosts app demo videos that double as a way to track the Darcy siblings' hunt for George Wickham without Lizzie being there to witness it.
- The Muppets made a version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on YouTube that turns out to have been a video conference (which, according to Kermit, "wasn't very productive").
- Nothing Much To Do is an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, told from the perspectives of Beatrice and Hero's and Benedick's YouTube channels (though his is frequently hijacked by Pedro). There's also "Watch Projects", a backup channel that focuses more on supplementary materials, like Ursula's songs.
Western Animation
- The Amazing World of Gumball had two episodes, "The Uploads" and "The Compilation," that showed a series of sketches presented as videos on Elmore Stream-It, the show's YouTube equivalent.
- Bluey (2018): The majority of "Faceytalk" is a video call on Bluey and Bingo's tablet shown in this perspective.
- BoJack Horseman: The Cold Open for the episode "Surprise!" shows Pickles' Internet streams over the years, complete with her viewers' comments and reactions.
- Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood has "Won't You Sing Along With Me?", which involves Daniel having an Internet chat with his friends upon finding out the Neighborhood Carnival is cancelled.
- Early episodes of Dora the Explorer are done in the style of a computer game, complete with a blue cursor popping up at specific moments. In addition, the intro takes place in a room with a computer playing the game on its monitor.
- The Loud House and Casagrandes: Hangin' At Home is done in the style of a virtual video chat between Lincoln and Ronnie Anne about their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The Simpsons:
- The Couch Gag for "Homer's Phobia" depicts the Simpson living room as a slow-loading AOL file.
- The episode "My Life as a Vlog" is told entirely through a series of vlog videos posted by the Simpson family.
- Steven Universe: "Video Chat" has Steven and Peridot do a the titular video call, it's presented from the viewpoint of Connie's laptop.