I’ve written about Jonathan Harris’s amazing Whale Hunt. In the above video, he talks about The Whale Hunt as storytelling platform, as well as other storytelling platforms, including the very talk he’s giving as a storytelling platform.
Pop!Tech, which describes itself as “a one-of-a-kind conference, a community of remarkable people, and an ongoing conversation about science, technology and the future of ideas” was the venue for Harris’s fascinating talk. Pop!Tech introduces the video with these words:
Jonathan Harris is redefining the idea of what it means to tell a story. Take a ride through an arctic whale hunt and plunge headfirst into the feelings Harris finds running rampant in cyberspace as he describes what he calls “storytelling platforms.”
In addition to talking about the Whale Hunt, Harris discusses his We Feel Fine project, which:
… harvest[s] human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved. The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices…
If you haven’t seen either of Harris’s projects or the video discussing them, you must. The video does fall apart a bit at the end with Harris’s experiment in turning the talk into a storytelling platform for the audience because participants weren’t miked and could barely be heard.
While Pop!Tech certainly showcases compelling thinkers and artists, I personally don’t find Harris a particularly thoughtful storyteller. He’s very creative, I’ll give him that. “We Feel Fine” is an amazing piece of work, but in the end, it’s a snapshot of the blogging world. It’s not telling any particular story, although I certainly appreciate it’s ability to spark the imagination through its distillation of images and sentences from English-speaking bloggers worldwide. “Whale Hunt” is a slide show with bells and whistles. It’s technically very interesting to be sure. But Harris’s claim that his platform can break the storyteller’s POV by allowing the viewer to be in control is naive. The platform certainly allows a viewer to play with the elements of story… but the images that make up the story, the essential building blocks, are predetermined by Harris himself. “Whale Hunt” is no different than choosing to read a novel by selecting every fourth sentence, or only reading odd numbered chapters, or only those paragraphs that have the word “cucumber” in it. “Whale Hunt” would be fun to play with, but Pop!Tech overstates Harris’ importance as a storytelling thinker.
Thanks for the comment, Tim. I guess one’s perspective may depend on how strictly one chooses to define story or storytelling. I choose to define them extremely loosely. That’s why I blog about such a range of story-related topics.
I do agree that “We Feel Fine” is probably not really storytelling; I mentioned it only because Harris does in his talk (and because it’s cool). And you may be right that Harris’s claim that “his platform can break the storyteller’s POV by allowing the viewer to be in control is naive;” I’ll have to thank about that more.
And I’m cracking up over the notion of reading only paragraphs with “cucumber” in them.