Tag Archives: storytelling

Symposium 09: The storytelling ecosystem

ecosystem services collapsing

Image via flickr user Martin Sharman

Stories in networked spaces can potentially be disparate connections of ‘bits’. The whole art of working in this space is to think about how these parts can come together to form something different that the sum of its parts. That’s what an ecosystem is: structures and patterns from individual parts – whether that be nature with its flora and fauna, or the online terrain of blogs or hypertext systems.

What’s interesting is that in these ecosystems, scale does not matter. Just because a tree may be the biggest in size, does to mean it’s the most important thing. Each part brings its own importance and diversity to the system. There is no privilege, no hierarchy, and most importantly, no centre. As Jason told us, we grow up thinking there is a centre to everything. This worldview is problematic, and makes it harder to adjust to the mindset that is more appropriate in understanding ecosystems. Everything intercommunicates in complex and interesting ways. However, there is no way of predicting in advance which parts will come to matter, and why this is the case. As Adrian reminds us, it’s only in the doing that these structures and relationships form.

In the symposium, we talked about Cowbird being a good example of the above.  This website, which is a “public library of human experience” takes individual’s stories and collates them into what Adrian calls a ‘soup’ of story, images and videos. These stories then shift from being a distinct island unto themselves, and start having relations with other stories. The story then grows as a consequence to these relations, out of the control of the author.

I asked whether this is similar to Twitter, which brings together information in a somewhat similar way. However, we discussed that Twitter is a timebound stream, which is more ephemeral in nature. You can aggregate and communicate with likeminded people, but it’s not a curatorial space. Hashtags, however, are a little bit more about curation and collation, but it is ultimately different from the above kind of ecosystem.

Week 06: Reflections

Well, it seems like we’re all very much stuck on this conception of narrative which I know I certainly am having difficulty getting my head around (even after writing this post on narrative here). A lot of the questions in today’s symposium were surrounding narrative and how we should think about it. What I gathered from the discussion is that the idea of what constitutes a narrative is still evolving. We shouldn’t be reductive and say ‘only x and y’ are narratives because it can make us miss a lot of things. However, Adrian seemed to disagree with this and reiterate that everything other than cause-and-effect is a series of random events. He stated that narrative infers – the events are not accidental and it is all related. He said to think that we can ‘narrate’ our own lives is an anthropomorphic vision that occurs when we see ourselves as storytelling machines. We can narrate afterwards, but otherwise it’s just cause-and-effect.

Next, we moved on to talk about interpretation and whether a filmmaker should try and control their audience’s interpretation of a work. Seth doesn’t like being told what to think and prefers the open structure. I agreed with what someone said about how it’s nice to be surprised, as opposed to constantly having your expectations met (this relates to the post I wrote on expectations here). Adrian pointed out that in language, everything only makes sense because of its relationship to everything else. When you look in a dictionary, a definition can only ever be described by other words. Things only meet something by virtue of the network of other things it finds itself in. So, therefore, as Ryan notes, “we can never be sure that sender and received have the same story in mind” because there is always a mismatch. Filmmakers cannot control interpretation: they have never been able to and they never will be able to. Adrian says that stories are a dance; meaning is a dance. I get the impression that Adrian likes to dance, in this sense.

We went on to talk more specifically about Korsakow and how it uses/rejects narrative. Adrian posed us the question – is Korsakow the right place to be telling a story?  Ryan says her sixth criteria for identifying narrative is the notion of closure, but this isn’t necessarily possible in K-films because there’s not really an ending (unless you use an end SNU, which is somewhat counterproductive to the software). Adrian thinks that the viewer should find their own sense of closure/an end to a work by deciding if they want to leave it there, or leave and come back (which is why Korsakow has the interesting feature of the continue option when you open a K-film). K-films are not disposable, one-off works. They’re designed to be grazed at. For Adrian, closure is mechanical. It’s the last page. The last frame. The closing credits. He used the example of fan-fction as a way to show us that it’s not up to the author to decide where the end it. People will decide it for themselves. Story is not medium specific, but the telling of it is. And it’s the telling of a story that matters, not the story itself. It think that’s why I love the above photo so much.

(Image via flickr)