Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 2 views
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A story is told by one person or by a creative team to an audience that is usually quiet, even receptive. Or at least that’s what a story used to be, and that’s how a story used to be told. Today, with digital networks and social media, this pattern is changing. Stories now are open-ended, branching, hyperlinked, cross-media, participatory, exploratory, and unpredictable. And they are told in new ways: Web 2.0 storytelling picks up these new types of stories and runs with them, accelerating the pace of creation and participation while revealing new directions for narratives to flow.
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Barbara Lindsey on 12 Mar 10Do you agree with this statement? -
loisramirez on 17 Oct 11I also agree with the statement. A story in this age can take a life of it's own (or many, depending one the variations created), it allows a constant input by others and consequently the evolution of the text and the author as well.
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To further define the term, we should begin by explaining what we mean by its first part: Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly coined Web 2.0 in 2004,1 but the label remains difficult to acceptably define. For our present discussion, we will identify two essential features that are useful in distinguishing Web 2.0 projects and platforms from the rest of the web: microcontent and social media.2
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creating a website through Web 2.0 tools is a radically different matter compared with the days of HTML hand-coding and of moving files with FTP clients.
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out of those manifold ways of writing and showing have emerged new practices for telling stories.
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Web 2.0 platforms are often structured to be organized around people rather than the traditional computer hierarchies of directory trees.
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I think this is a very important feature, since the web is not as static anymore and more people friendly, we as users feel more encourage to collaborate and create our own content.
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Websites designed in the 1990s and later offered few connecting points for individuals, generally speaking, other than perhaps a guestbook or a link to an e-mail address. But Web 2.0 tools are built to combine microcontent from different users with a shared interest:
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If readers closely examine a Web 2.0 project, they will find that it is often touched by multiple people, whether in the content creation or via associated comments or discussion areas. If they participate actively, by contributing content, we have what many call social media.
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But Web 2.0's lowered bar to content creation, combined with increased social connectivity, ramps up the ease and number of such conversations, which are able to extend outside the bounds of a single environment.
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Does the definition of Web 2.0 given in this article help you to better understand your experiences thus far in this course?
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Another influential factor of Web 2.0 is findability: the use of comprehensive search tools that help story creators (and readers) quickly locate related micocontent with just a few keywords typed into a search field.
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Social bookmarking and content tagging
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the "art of conveying events in words, images, and sounds often by improvisation or embellishment."4 Annette Simmons sees the storyteller’s empathy and sensory detail as crucial to "the unique capability to tap into a complex situation we have all experienced and which we all recognize."5
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I also agree with this comment, something as simple as a keyword can trigger a memory and bring back information that we have learned.
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Web 2.0 stories are often broader: they can represent history, fantasy, a presentation, a puzzle, a message, or something that blurs the boundaries of reality and fiction.
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On one level, web users experienced a great deal of digital narratives created in non-web venues but published in HTML, such as embedded audio clips, streaming video, and animation through the Flash plug-in. On another level, they experienced stories using web pages as hypertext lexia, chunks of content connected by hyperlinks.
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While HTML narratives continued to be produced, digital storytelling by video also began, drawing on groundbreaking video projects from the 1970s.
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By the time of the emergence of blogs and YouTube as cultural media outlets, Tim O'Reilly's naming of Web 2.0, and the advent of social media, storytelling with digital tools had been at work for nearly a generation.
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Starting from our definitions, we should expect Web 2.0 storytelling to consist of Web 2.0 practices.
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In each of these cases, the relative ease of creating web content enabled social connections around and to story materials.
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Web 2.0 creators have many options about the paths to set before their users. Web 2.0 storytelling can be fully hypertextual in its multilinearity. At any time, the audience can go out of the bounds of the story to research information (e.g., checking names in Google searches or looking for background information in Wikipedia).
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User-generated content is a key element of Web 2.0 and can often enter into these stories. A reader can add content into story platforms directly: editing a wiki page, commenting on a post, replying in a Twitter feed, posting a video response in YouTube. Those interactions fold into the experience of the overall story from the perspective of subsequent readers.
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On a less complex level, consider the 9th Btn Y & L War Diaries blog project, which posts diary entries from a World War I veteran. A June 2008 post (http://yldiaries.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html) contains a full wartime document, but the set of comments from others (seven, as of this writing) offer foreshadowing, explication of terms, and context.
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Consider how these new media create rich dissertation and research opportunities.
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As with the rest of Web 2.0, it is up to readers and viewers to analyze and interpret such content and usually to do so collaboratively.
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At times, this distributed art form can range beyond the immediate control of a creator.
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Creators can stage content from different sites.
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Other forms leverage the Web 2.0 strategies of aggregating large amounts of microcontent and creatively selecting patterns out of an almost unfathomable volume of information.
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The Twitter content form (140-character microstories) permits stories to be told in serialized portions spread over time.
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It is also a great way to practice not only creative writing but due to the 140 character limitation; this is a new challenge for a writer, how to say a lot in a just a few words.
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It also poses several challenges: to what extent can we fragment (or ‘microchunk,’ in the latest parlance) literature before it becomes incoherent? How many media can literature be forced into—if, indeed, there is any limit?"
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Facebook application that remixes photos drawn from Flickr (based on tags) with a set of texts that generate a dynamic graphic novel.
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movie trailer recuts
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At a different—perhaps meta—level, the boundaries of Web 2.0 stories are not necessarily clear. A story's boundaries are clear when it is self-contained, say in a DVD or XBox360 game. But can we know for sure that all the followers of a story's Twitter feed, for example, are people who are not involved directly in the project? Turning this question around, how do we know that we've taken the right measure of just how far a story goes, when we could be missing one character's blog or a setting description carefully maintained by the author on Wikipedia?
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The Beast was described by its developer, Sean Stewart: “We would tell a story that was not bound by communication platform: it would come at you over the web, by email, via fax and phone and billboard and TV and newspaper, SMS and skywriting and smoke signals too if we could figure out how.
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instead of telling a story, we would present the evidence of that story, and let the players tell it to themselves.”15
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How might your students who come to your courses with these kinds of experiences impact the way you present your content?
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In addition, the project served as an illustrative example of the fact that no one can know about all of the possible web tools that are available.
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web video storytelling, primarily through YouTube
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Web 2.0 storytelling offers two main applications for colleges and universities: as composition platform and as curricular object.
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Students can use blogs as character studies.
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The reader is driven to read more, not only within the rest of that post but also across the other sites of the story: the archive of posts so far, the MySpace page, the resources copied and pointed to. Perhaps the reader ranges beyond the site, to the rest of the research world—maybe he or she even composes a response in some Web 2.0 venue.
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Yet the blog form, which accentuates this narrative, is accessible to anyone with a browser. Examples like Project 1968 offer ready models for aspiring writers to learn from. Even though the purpose of Project 1968 is not immediately tied to a class, it is a fine example for all sorts of curricular instances, from history to political science, creative writing to gender studies, sociology to economics.
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it’s worth remembering that using Web 2.0 storytelling is partly a matter of scale. Some projects can be Web 2.0 stories, while others integrate Web 2.0 storytelling practices.
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Lecturers are familiar with telling stories as examples, as a way to get a subject across. They end discussions with a challenging question and create characters to embody parts of content (political actors, scientists, composite types). Imagine applying those habits to a class Twitter feed or Facebook group.
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For narrative studies, Web 2.0 stories offer an unusual blend of formal features, from the blurry boundaries around each story to questions of chronology.
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An epistolary novel, trial documents, a lab experiment, or a soldier's diaries—for example, WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier (http://wwar1.blogspot.com/)—come to life in this new format.
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epigrams are well suited to being republished or published by microblogging tools, which focus the reader’s attention on these compressed phases. An example is the posting of Oscar Wilde’s Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894), on Twitter (http://twitter.com/oscarwilde). Other compressed forms of writing can be microblogged also, such as Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines (1906), also on Twitter (http://twitter.com/novelsin3lines). As Dan Visel observed of the latter project: “Fénéon . . . was secretly a master of miniaturized text. . . . Fénéon's hypercompression lends itself to Twitter. In a book, these pieces don't quite have space to breathe; they're crowded by each other, and it's more difficult for the reader to savor them individually. As Twitter posts, they're perfectly self-contained, as they would have been when they appeared as feuilleton.”21
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A publicly shared Web 2.0 story, created by students for a class, afterward becomes something that other students can explore. Put another way, this learning tool can produce materials that subsequently will be available as learning objects.
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We expect to see new forms develop from older ones as this narrative world grows—even e-mail might become a new storytelling tool.22 Moreover, these storytelling strategies could be supplanted completely by some semantic platform currently under development. Large-scale gaming might become a more popular engine for content creation. And mobile devices could make microcontent the preferred way to experience digital stories.
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perhaps the best approach for educators is simply to give Web 2.0 storytelling a try and see what happens. We invite you to jump down the rabbit hole. Add a photo to Flickr and use that as a writing prompt. Flesh out a character in Twitter. Follow a drama unfolding on YouTube. See how a wiki supports the gradual development of a setting. Then share with all of us what you have learned about this new way of telling, and listening to, stories.
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The interwoven characters, relationships, settings, and scenes that result are the stuff of stories, regardless of how closely mapped onto reality they might be; this also distinguishes a Web 2.0 story from other blogging forms, such as political or project sites (except as satire or criticism!).
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in sharp contrast to the singular flow of digital storytelling. In the latter form, authors create linear narratives, bound to the clear, unitary, and unidirectional timeline of the video format and the traditional story arc. Web 2.0 narratives can follow that timeline, and podcasts in particular must do so. But they can also link in multiple directions.