Story -- ever it takes

August 28, 2003

Driving from Plainfield, Vermont to the hard coal fields of Pennsylvania on a recent sweltering but summeresque Friday afternoon, I listened to radio broadcasts about the historic electrical outage that had occurred the day before and from which cities throughout the northeast United States and Canada were struggling to recover.

The power outage put me to thinking about my work in digital storytelling. If the power is off, I am out of business. I can shoot digital photographs, but I cannot upload them. I cannot work on the website. I cannot write the story on the computer. Well, well, well, haven’t I chosen a fine field to master, I muttered. I might as well revise my study plans and work in performance and print, mediums we’ve already mastered as a culture, mediums in which there are many issues and subjects left to explore, mediums I already know through years of theoretical study and through practice.

Where is the challenge though? Ah, but it’s nice to feel secure in what you know. It’s nice to be a recognized expert, a celebrated performer, an award-winning journalist … Yeah, who needs challenge when the world is spinning in crazy ways? Revise the study plan. Go for safe. A perception of “safe” is so cozy when one is venturing into new or different territory. Think about those many women who do not leave abusive relationships because, in their minds, the unknown is more frightening than the recognized monsters with whom they cohabitate. Consider all the people who revile rising in the morning because what they do suffocates the spirit right out of them. To these dispirited folks, the “known unsafes” are better than the “unknown safes.”

I merged to the right lane of Interstate 89, choosing to travel slowly, somewhere within the speed limit. Look at all the work this digital narrative stuff involves, I thought. To have an audience, that is the people you most want to reach, you have to first help them to understand reading on the computer. In some cases, YOU have to help them know how to turn on and operate a computer. Many need lessons on how to navigate to reliable and quality information.

In Digital Literacy, Paul Gilster points out that because the Internet is mostly unfiltered and unedited, anyone can contribute content. This means, he avows and I agree, critical thinking becomes paramount to efficient and accurate use of the Internet as a trustworthy resource.

Like the traveler I was, I let my mind take a turn toward thoughts about print culture. A bibliophile and a book discussion leader, I feel the power of story every time I sit in a circle with fellow readers to talk about a book, its writer and the story within its pages. Really, do I want to continue this computer thing when the printed word so electrifies our present culture?

I was back to safe, back to the known knowns.

Gilster says we have to “punch through” a barrier whereby we do not want to read a book on the computer when it is readily available at the local bookstore. “The Net changes the relationship between content provider and audience,” he writes (37). Gilster compares this thinking paradigm shift to “galvanic swings in thinking and research that followed the work of Copernicus, of Newton, and of Einstein. (each built upon the work of his predecessor and altered the system of science.)

A humanities writer, Gilster makes a great deal of theoretical and practical sense in his book, although I disagree with his assertion that hypertext is not purposeful for reading fictional stories. “Our challenge is to use technology in ways that enrich the human experience,” he opines (23). Gilster’s friendly tone and non-technical explanations of computers and computing make this book a functional resource for people wanting to understand how to think, write and perform traditional academic and communications functions in a digital environment.

Using the digital space – place – to “tell” stories can enrich the human experience, I deduce. It is merely another stage on which the storyteller can present. What’s more, technology, evolving constantly, offers immediacy, much like a listener receives an oral story. So, telling stories in new media involves learning how to use the traditional tools of the trade and new technology to illuminate issues with which we wrangle and to entertain.

"By modeling worlds, we will invariably learn more about our own, with the likely eventuality that a virtual world will, in its own way, prove as surprising and multitextured as a physical one,” Gilster opines. “And it’s just possible that extended and highly developed virtual environments may offer us clues as we attempt to master the critical issues of living together in a physical world that is running out of resources and facing shortages in key areas of skill and education.” (252-3)

KAPOW!

The light came on. You’re not out of business, I realized. You must simply change your community to accommodate the audience. How’s that for a postmodernistic moment? Surely, that was a true display of fragmentation, of associative thinking, which is what hypertext writing – a component of digital storytelling – is all about.

Therefore, it is no big deal if the lights go out. A good story is a good story no matter where or how you tell it. If the lights go out, you’ve got addressees outside on the street, an assembly stranded in the dark. In the case of people marooned as a result of nonfunctioning technology, you have a live and captured (probably not initially captive) audience for which to perform.

"Whatever the medium, the best survives,” says Tom Koch in his 1996 book The Message is the Medium Online All the Time for Everyone (210).

Koch, geographer, journalist and author, asserts that Marshall McLuhan's “the medium is the message” is backwards, that it is a myth of the evolving electronic age. It is the message we should be analyzing not the medium, he charges. Even though I see McLuhan's point, I also believe there is a lot of validity in what Koch says. It relates to my belief that a good story is a good story no matter how or where you present it.

"Online, offline, broadcast news, or Morse code: the medium merely carries the data we all require. It is through the messy complex of reported facts, opinions, perceptions, reports—the disparate elements of fact and surmise that we retrieve from every conceivable source—that each of attempts to make sense of our individuals lives and shared times. From the perspective of the user, the medium is not the message any more than the crushed velvet little box holding a diamond ring is the real present bestowed, on traditionally bent knee, in the time –honored form of a request for marriage.”

How fitting just then that, in my travel toward home, I had to access a road I had never before journeyed.