For much of human history, telling eachother stories was a great way to keep eachother entertained, and to provide food for thought on topics such as history, society and morals. With the introduction of radio, film and television, people are less and less inclined to tell eachother stories for entertainment.
A thing I noticed when listening to old speeches, is that statespersons used to be much more dramatic and elaborate in their speech patterns than their contemporary counterparts. I'm wondering if the two phenomena are related?
I think you have intuitively hit on something, but I'm not sure your core assumption is correct. People still tell stories, but the stories tend to be shorter and more to the point. The classic age of the storyteller telling a tale that spanned several nights passed away decades ago - at least in Western cultures. Consider the classic essay by James Delargy on the Irish Storyteller (1946) and the more recent book by Georges Denis Zimmermann, The Irish Storyteller (2001).
The thing I have noticed is that there has been a growing impatience that insists on the efficient presentation of information - whether in essay and scholarship or in fictional narrative. The modern, information-based society simply wants everything laid out as quickly as possible. One can see that in the pace of many of the films from the 1930s as opposed to now, and it seems evident in literature. I sat through the classic musicals of the 1940s-1960s (and even enjoyed them when they were relatively new), and now I find them ponderous and impossible to watch. And the same thing has occurred with literature: Victorian-era classics were standard fare, but now they can be, again, ponderous. And this is something I have discussed with my age-peer group, with whom there is some consensus.
I would see the change not in the lack of storytelling, but rather in the emergence of the information age, which stresses efficiency in the transmission of information and ideas. And with that, I have probably taken too long with this explanation!
this would also fit in /r/linguistics.
I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but you might want to research some of Milman Parry's work. His work on oral poets is, I think, universally accepted and explained how illiterate bards could seemingly memorize huge epics, or at least that's what I was taught as a Classics student.
While I was learning Homeric Greek, the topic of storytelling came up and one of my professor's explained that it had previously been a mystery how an illiterate poet like "Homer" could compose the epics hundreds(ish) of years before they were written down in Greek. So, this crazy smart Parry guy traveled around Yugoslavia in the 1930s and realized that there were stages through which an illiterate bard could learn the craft of telling and creating epics. Basically, a child would start out like an intern and learn key plot lines of a story that would rarely change through listening to an elder bard over and over. During this time he would also learn key epithets and formulaic lines. Over the years, he would begin to learn how to compose epics on the spot following the same basic plots and throwing in the formulaic lines when he would forget where he was going with his story or got stuck. It was also noticed that epics often followed a kind of palindrome-like story line, which would also help the poet remember where he needed to go later on in his composition. In this way it became obvious that no two tellings of the same epic by the same poet would ever be the same because the poem was not memorized, but was composed with each and every telling. It's really interesting stuff. Anyway, it's also important to remember that these were epics that were used for entertainment and would span over several nights. The final conclusion by my professor was that widespread literacy helped bring down oral composition because we now use our brains differently and no longer need to memorize huge amounts of information.
The final conclusion is yes, at least for epic poets. There would be key words, phrases and epithets that would get the listener all riled up because they knew the stories since childhood and knew what would be happening next.