Speaking about my essay, Agency and Medium, was difficult, because I’m terrified of public speaking, but also reasonably easy because I realised that I know what I’m talking about. While it was difficult to articulate what I was thinking, due to the fear, the information was there. Listening to what other people had to say about their essays was more interesting of course because it was new. Unfortunately I was late and didn’t hear anyone else speaking about my essay topic, but hearing about others was very engaging.

While my essay wasn’t directly involved with ideas of story, it touched on the ideas of agency and how the audience’s involvement in a text will alter their experience of the text and the feelings which it provokes. Listening to others talk about story, particularly hearing Sarah discuss dance as a form of storytelling, straying far from the digital realm which we focus on in class, was enlightening though. The emotionally provocative nature of dance as a physical medium of storytelling is highly involved with the audience’s experience of story, while I would not think that it involved agency, this would be focused on empathy, two different and I’m sure two of many, emotive responses to storytelling.

My new ‘philosophy’ of storytelling is that storytelling is taking an audience on an emotional journey of perception and understanding. The medium, structure and method of conveying a sense of narrative is important to the creation and perception of stories but are not all that relevant to the defining of a narrative as a story.