Web 2.0 Storytelling

This is your story.

This is your story on drugs. (aka Web 2.0)

Out of this World

May sound ridiculous, but compared to conventional methods, Web 2.0 storytelling draws more parallels to drug use than one might think. It's more rebellious, more social, and most importantly, it's free; free-spirited, free from structure and authority and academia. Every website, hyperlink, text message, iPhone app--they're all gateway drugs--psychedelics expanding our minds to new levels of consciousness, frontiers of space and creativity, inconceivable before the information age. Web 2.0 is a renaissance of writ. Creative writing and social networking haven't been this cool since Haight-Ashbury.

So have I tasted the sweet essence of endless digital possibilities? Have I succumbed to the temptress of the wiki-blogosphere? In a word, yes. I have seen the light. My notions of what constitutes a story have been forever altered. Like my mind. My mind has been altered by this mind-altering substance that is web 2.0 storytelling. Ok, I'll stop exaggerating.

But in all seriousness, I am really blown away by what new and exciting concepts people are creating all in the name of and for the sake of storytelling. From feather pens to photographs, to phonographs and film. We've come as far in the past ten years as we did the hundred years before them. Now we can actually combine all of those aforementioned elements together and link them to networks the world over. If there was ever a collective conscious shared by all who read the same story, now we can actually contribute to that incredible comprehensiveness.

Crash Course

Of the articles listed for us on Moodle, I was least impressed with the CDS videos and the Alice in Twitterland. I found Lust Bites and Two Million Happy Feet to be, for lack of a better word, delightful. I am really impressed by how dedicated this community of writers, be it professional or amateur, are to this phenomenon. Most enlightening to me were the Timely Raven and the Jonathan Harris TED piece.

The Timely Raven reads somewhat like a blog or journal, but moves like an online puzzle or video game. I never would have thought a google map could be used to tell stories. I love that it gets you not only inside the mind of the raven, but of the other characters involved. It gives you the freedom to roam wherever you want, and decide for yourself which direction to go and whose story to follow. I've always wanted to go to Austin for its arts community, but now I want to go even more.

Extracting Existential Experiences

The Jonathan Harris TED piece is just awe-inspiring. Right away he reminds the audience that there is a story behind everything--a photograph, a rusty coin, a ticket stub--they all hold some amount of sentimental value to someone. Objects are a key to unlocking our memories. Those memories are stored within us, but can only be accessed by these particular objects. When we find other people's artifacts, we are looking to see if they left upon it any piece of themselves. This is what Jonathan calls "a partial glimpse," which he claims to prefer over knowing the whole story. Forest Gump gives a great example of this when he says, "You can tell a lot about a person by their shoes." Pawn shops and thrift stores are somewhat of a memorial commons--a supermarket for sharing our 'soles.' What they lack in income levels they more than make up for in substance. I have heard Oprah say that everyone has a story, but I had never really given much thought to the notion that every thing has a story as well. You might not think that a rock would have as rich a history as that of a tree. But when you consider it was the rock that David used to slay Goliath, it changes the whole dynamic. All of sudden that rock is sacred. We've injected our beliefs into it, to the point that it becomes as personified as the sun and the moon. That rock holds more love and respect than most common men.

The conversation gets really interesting when Jonathan begins to talk about computer science. His "We Feel Fine" project is UNBELIEVABLE. I haven't seen something that fantastic in a sci-fi film! The closest they've come that I can think of off the top of my head is The Architect from Matrix Reloaded, but even that was little more than a man with a million television screens--not a very original concept. It's as if Jonathan's created a visual of our thoughts. He has the world at his fingertips; "the whole world in his hands." At the outset, I had nearly written him off as a dweeb, a nerd, a bleeding heart, half-assed art creep. It wasn't long before I began eating my words with intense shame and urgency. Artist, storyteller, internet anthropologist...the man's a modern day genius.

While I didn't like the slideshow of whale slaughter, I was intrigued by the concepts that came out of it. It's as if Jonathan's using HTML to rewrite the book on storytelling (pun intended). He's recognized that "we are very accustomed to this idea of 'the narrator,' or the camera position--some kind of omniscient, external body, through whose eyes you see the story...In real life, things are much more nuanced and complexed..." So rather than narrate a traditional story line, he's built a program to extract different narratives from a larger, actual experience--a perfect representation of Web 2.0 storytelling. Again, he's combined the older mediums to build a model for what has always been invisible. He's putting you as close to the experience as possible without having been there in person. There are only a few steps left between his model and real life experience: virtual reality and surrogacy, or avatars. His technology is no doubt leading us in that direction. The components (he uses) of a story are essential to human life, neither of which--the story (or at least its medium) and life itself--will ever be the same again.