Defining Digital Storytelling…
My Digital Storytelling class was asked to try to define "digital storytelling." Below is my reply.
It seems to me like we've got one of those blind-men-and-an-elephant problems, here. I've been playing around with trying to come up with a working definition of "digital storytelling" for a couple days, now, and honestly, anything I can come up with is simultaneously:
- So broad as to be meaningless.
- Still far too restrictive.
This does not bode well for the prospect of coming up with anything that even resembles a "definitive answer" to the question of what "digital storytelling" is.
Which makes this class seem a bit amorphous.
The best I can come with is this: "Digital storytelling" is the use of digital (non-analog, usually computer-based) media to create (or suggest) a narrative (or set of narratives or narrative possibilities).
I could unpack that a little, but I'm afraid to do so too much, because the more you do, the more restrictive your definition becomes. So let me just sort of ramble about a couple of the implications of this.
The use of digital techniques alters older technologies by lowering barriers to use in both cost and necessity of technical skill. While techniques like sophisticated 3-d rendering are still prohibitively difficult for amateur users, digital photography, videography, sound recording, and image alteration have continued to get cheaper, faster, and easier. Looking at a the technological forces behind this, things like Moore's Law, Rock's Law, and Nielson's Law all suggest that this pattern will continue. All things digital will continue to get faster, cheaper, easier, and better, as long as research and development continue.
Not only is this true with individual digitized media, but it is also true of the ability of computers to integrate various forms of media into a coherent whole. Digital technology continues to make it easier, faster, and cheaper to put together still and moving images, sounds, and written words, to combine them into new integrated wholes.
And just like the words and pictures of a comic strip, each of these elements gains something in combination with other elements-- it's a synergistic relationship. Looking at just the words or just the images of your average comic strip, you realize that either element is less meaningful when not interacting with the other. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. It's the same thing with digital stories that incorporate multiple media.
While words, pictures, sound, and video are all clearly important building blocks for digital stories, it is important not to exclude the "natively digital" media that can be incorporated into digital storytelling projects-- the two that spring immediately to mind are simulation and databases.
Both of these technologies present us with some of the most dramatic possibilities of digital storytelling: they do not necessarily follow-- and indeed can be used to actively undermine-- the traditional notions of narrativity we have from old media. Storytelling is no longer necessarily limited to a single beginning, middle, and end. Instead, creators have the ability to chart various paths that audiences can take, indeed-- audiences are no longer limited to "passive" intake, but can actively guide their own user experience, taking the driver's seat or even helping to build and extend the story itself.
Of course, audiences have never been particularly passive, and have always re-purposed, remixed, and reinterpreted the media they consume. The difference now is that we can construct stories that encourage or even force audiences to do just that. It can be built into the medium itself, now, rather than just being built into how humans consume stories.
Tell a story in five pictures…
In my Digital Storytelling class, we were asked to tell a story in five pictures, inspired by a Flickr community of educators trying to do just that.
Below is my attempt:
Interactivity and Digital Storytelling…
NB-- this is primarily cannibalized from a post I made on the class blog of the Digital Storytelling class I'm currently taking. I like to keep my stuff all in one place, though.
I have to admit that, while many of the examples of "digital storytelling projects" that my classmates posted to the class blog were quite interesting and well-done, and some where quite thought-provoking and evocative, they felt a little... old media?
Basically, they were just low-budget, one-person documentary shorts.
One of the really fascinating things about new media technology, however, is the interactivity of it. If you use the internet in 2010, you are almost certainly not just a media consumer. You are a producer. The most successful sites on the internet-- from Youtube to Facebook to Twitter to Google itself-- are not content creators. They are frameworks that host user-generated content, sort it, make it manageable, encourage discovery. From the moment Tim Berners-Lee began to conceptualize the World Wide Web as something interlaced, hypertextual, navigated by users, the web has challenged models of passive viewership. The web is interactive. New media is interactive.
So where's the interactivity in digital storytelling? Well, it seems to be coming. Though it is still pretty primitive in its application.
A sidebar of sorts:
Is it still storytelling if it's interactive? If the author relinquishes some degree of control to the audience, is it still his or her story?
I would argue that it absolutely is. While a was a voracious and omnivorous reader as a child, one of my sisters' and my favorite series of books was Bantam's Choose Your Own Adventure series. Essentially bound hypertext, the book would take a forking narrative format, where the reader was, at key moments, presented with choices. The reader's choices determined the outcome, but the author's vision remained at the center. Forked stories could fork back into themselves at time-- especially in a time-travel story.
While most video games are admittedly thin on narrative, some of the best follow a similar course-- allowing player decisions to influence the chain of events within several forked narrative outcomes.
That digression over, I have to say, I haven't found exactly what I was looking for. I haven't found any single example that illustrates well how exciting this possibility is. But let me run through a couple examples-- all imperfect in some way-- that illustrate what kind of thinking I'm talking about. All of these take advantage of Youtube's fairly recent annotation feature.
"B-Boy Joker" is very well-implemented, though it's more of a game than a story. Even by game standards, there's not much narrative: The Joker and Batman are having a dance battle. You have to match your opponent's moves or he will defeat you. Not really a story at all. But the action is compelling, the use of annotations is highly effective, and the stop-motion animation is top-notch. One could imagine making a project that was more narrative along similar lines.
Similarly, "Youtube's first weekly game show" Truth or Fail, is pretty lacking as a narrative, being more of a game. But while B-Boy Joker was more like a video game, Truth or Fail resembles a (highly eccentric) quiz show. Nevertheless, there is a beginning, middle, and end, and since many of us if not all of us are interested in the informative and pedagogical uses of digital storytelling, I thought it bore mentioning because it's pretty easy to see how such a framework could be used educationally.
Finally, I found two more traditionally narrative interactive videos that unfortunately seem to be experiencing technical difficulties. Annnotations on some of the videos in these series seem to be broken, so clicking on the screen doesn't always work. But go and check out The Time Machine: An Interactive Adventure and Choose Your Path: Find Sparta! and try to imagine them actually working.
At any rate, it seems obvious to me that interactivity is a pretty exciting possibility in digital storytelling. And that, unfortunately, we might not be quite there yet.