This is a social activity that involves the sharing of stories between people present. They can take many forms, whatever the storyteller so wishes and often involves some sort of theatrics or emphasis. Every human culture has its own traditional narratives and stories that are used for many reasons whether educational, culturally preserving or just entertaining.
What defines a story is its characters, plot and usually a narrative point of view, whether of the people themselves if recounting their own story or of someone overlooking the stories situation. Storytelling normally only refers to the oral method of delivering a story to other people and has loosely been applied to other techniques used to tell a story in media.