Once upon a time storytelling was something we all took for granted. Now there are fears that one of the oldest human activities is heading for an unhappy ending as the incessant chatter of the internet, mobile phones, video games and multichannel television erodes our ability to cope with and create satisfying narratives.

Hollywood veterans and experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are so concerned that they have set up a $25 million (£17 million) “laboratory” to save the old-fashioned story.

Matt Damon, who co-wrote his breakthrough film, Good Will Hunting, about an MIT janitor, is understood to be in talks about taking a seat on the board of the new organisation.

The Centre for Future Storytelling sounds like something from a novel by George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, but its founders say that its mission is benign. “Our big question is, can the story survive?” David Kirkpatrick, the former president of Paramount Pictures, said. “Civilisation needs stories as much as it needs wheels, fire and fibreoptics. We’re not talking about going back to campfires. We want to use technology to keep storytelling alive.”

At the centre, part of MIT’s Media Laboratory, engineers, inventors and IT experts will work with artists, directors, designers and local school-children to build storytelling “tools”.

It will be based initially on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2010 it will have a second department 50 miles away at Plymouth Rock Studios, a film and TV studio that Mr Kirkpatrick co-founded. Plymouth Rock is investing $25 million in the project over the next seven years.

“Nobody is really looking at the way that narrative is told or distributed in the modern world,” Mr Kirkpatrick said. “There were no CDs in 1980, no Google employees in 1997, no DVDs in 1998, no YouTube viewers in 2003. This incredible crunch of change has produced a snack culture sensibility which has got us grazing through life.

“We are not saying that literature is dead or that long-form narrative is finished. We are just reading the tea leaves and they are alarming.”

Mr Kirkpatrick cited a screenwriter friend with a PhD who used to reread her favourite book, The Great Gatsby, every year for inspiration. “Now she can’t get through it. She can’t actually read 200 pages,” he said.

Mr Kirkpatrick’s own epiphany came while watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in a cinema this year. “I found myself texting somebody during the movie – something I would never have done as a young man.

“This is a very interesting phenomenon for those of us in the storytelling business. How do we make meaningful entertainment for people who cannot focus? Our brains are very elastic and change constantly. I find I look at a movie now as opposed to feeling it and skim a book rather than read it, so what’s going to happen to stories in another 50 years?”

Hollywood has become “an interpreter of pop culture” rather than a home for original work, he said.

Among the hit films that Mr Kirkpatrick worked on in the 1980s were Top Gun, An Officer and a Gentleman, Footloose and Witness, all of which were original stories. “None of them would have a chance of getting made now,” he said.

Frank Moss, the director of the MIT Media Lab, believes that technology is both a serious threat to traditional narrative and a vehicle for renewing it. He said that in ten years’ time storytelling would “bleed across” media much more than it did at present, and that stories would “be experienced not only in the virtual world, but in the real world too”.

He added: “The challenge is to acknowledge the inevitability of change, that kids especially take media in small chunks continuously now. My dream is that the depth of stories to convey meaning, importance and emotion can be preserved in this world of on-the-run multiple media. Storytelling is at the very root of what makes us uniquely human.”

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