Stories are part of our DNA. Going back to our early ancestors sitting around campfires, stories have been an essential way for us to communicate great truths, inspire, teach, and to simply entertain.

It is tempting to believe that books and stories are no longer important in our modern age. People have the Internet with social media to communicate, there is text messaging, video chats, and we have uncountable video games, also 24 hour news channels, Youtube, an endless number of ways to interact and connect and be distracted.

Long ago when I was a teenager and there was no hint of an Internet, no video games, and three lousy television channels out in the country where I lived. Communication was face to face, our party-line telephone was useless. It was a different world from the smartphone world we live in today. And books were the main source of entertainment.

Ebooks have made telling stories easy today, they are both inexpensive and highly portable. Anyone with a smartphone or cheap tablet can read ebooks. Classics by great authors like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and the complete plays of Shakespeare are completely free and easy to find. We are living in a flood of stories. And new authors have very little to hinder them from telling their stories and getting those stories into the hands of readers quickly. This is an amazing time to live in.

Of course the down side of this awesome time is that we must compete with the entire ensemble of technology, including streaming music, videos, games, everything that the Internet brings, and more television channels than any human being ever needs or even wants.

Nevertheless, there is a human need for stories, whether it is the latest popular series on a cable television channel, or an audio book playing in the background, or a modern hardcover bestseller, stories are who we are, an essential part of us.

We have an ongoing battle living in an attention deficit culture today. Every few minutes a new shiny thing reaches out to grab our attention and distract. The smartphone is the main culprit with its constant sounds and notices popping up. But there is much to steal away attention in this age. Yet we have on our side the need, just like a need for food and water, an inborn need for stories. It may be that television and streaming video is fulfilling some of that need, but I believe the creative, imaginative hunger within us desires something more.

When we read we also create. Watching a video is mentally lazy. The creator of that video has no need of our imagination beyond simply invoking "secondary belief" or suspension of "primary belief" so we can accept the story being told. Yet reading books or listening to audio books requires active imagination. The author may do a good job of describing a scene or a character, but our imagination automatically fills in the details, begins to work, is drawn into the creative act. Reading is not passive, it requires something of us, yet rewards us by taking us out of ourselves and into somewhere else. We learn, we experience, and we participate in a event that is greater than the endless distractions in our daily lives.

Stories are here to stay, no matter where the technology takes us. Perhaps one day we will simply plug in and download stories into our brains, but the fact is we need stories, and we always will, no matter the delivery system. The need for stories is hard-wired into us, and by creating and ingesting stories we are involved in an age old process that fulfills an ongoing need, an endless longing. Yes, we will always need stories.