2009's Top 10 Growth Areas for Applied Storytelling: Part 1

Well, I wanted this entry to be the top 10 applied-storytelling developments in 2009, but none of the areas I identified within applied storytelling — with the possible exception of No. 10 — are really new this year.

Instead, these are areas experiencing tremendous growth and buzz this year. If we heard about them last year and before, we heard a lot more about them this year.

Here’s the first half of my Top 10 list:

Twitter not only unites the storytelling community by disseminating storytelling information in real time, but it also serves as a storytelling vehicle for some. Twitter has given the storytelling community new ways to keep on top of storytelling news and thought in real time. We can follow other story practitioners. We can find tools to bring us regular tweets focused on storytelling. Twitter’s new list feature enables us to focus our “listening” efforts on story practitioners. The community is more cohesive through tweeting and re-tweeting our passion. My periodic roundups of what’s hot in the Twitterverse have spotlighted the storytelling topics that are getting the most buzz. Arguably, Twitter is also a storytelling medium in itself, as I’ve written about here, here, here, and here, where I blogged about Cathie Dodd’s Labor Day Twitterthon. In his Censemaking blog, Cameron D. Norman, PhD, recently noted that the “narrative fragments” of Twitter tweets may “better fit with our cognitive tendencies for sensemaking.” Tweets may be more like the interactions in our everyday lives in which communications rarely comprise “a full-fledged story; one that had a clear start, middle, end and coherence that could only be gathered from the story itself, not past relationships with the storyteller.” Norman talks about Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework as providing “a theoretically-grounded and data-driven method of making sense of large quantities of narrative fragments; the kind we tell in organizations and communities.” You can devise lots of ways to keep up with what the Twiiterverse is tweeting about storytelling, such as by following the folks in Kat’s Definitive Story Follow List or @AStoriedCareer’s Twitter list of storytelling practitioners, or by setting up various kinds of search streams and alerts on the term “storytelling.”
Storytelling for career and job search makes significant strides. To the best of my knowledge, the first book completely devoted to storytelling in the job search was published this year. That would be my book, Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career. More career practitioners are recognizing the value of storytelling; I know of four of them who recently attended a workshop by New York City’s Narrativ. I increasingly learn of more and more career and job-search gurus who are lending their voices to the chorus to those of us who support storytelling in the job search.
Digital storytelling explodes, especially in education. Conduct a search of Google or Twitter for the term “storytelling” and note how many of the results are about “digital storytelling.” As I monitor thought, happenings, comments, developments in the storytelling world, I am struck by the omnipresence of digital storytelling. Educators in particular are singing the praises of digital storytelling for teaching and learning. I’ve chosen not to make digital storytelling a major topic on A Storied Career simply because it’s such a huge niche, and I assume that others who practice in this niche can cover it better than I can.
More Web sites and Web-based applications/tools spring up to facilitate storytelling. I’ve discovered these in the last year (However, some may have emerged before this year): Storytlr, Great Life Stories, Always Stories, The Timeslips Project, We Are Storytellers, The Legacy Project, Flokka: Share Your Stories, Cityscapes of the Displaced, Bloombla, Why Go to Therapy When You Can Go Absolutely Insane?, Penzu, Storyz, Life Story Telling, LifeSnapz, Creativity Workshop, Scrapblog, Women’s Memoirs, ThisMoment, Telling Herstories, LifeBlob, Story of My Life, and Makes Me Think. In fact, so many storytelling platforms have emerged online that inevitably some are succeeding, while others aren’t making it. As reported on Mashable, Storytlr is shutting down on the last day of this year for lack of time and commercial interest to sustain the platform. But the founders are open-sourcing the platform so “existing users can download all of their data and migrate to a self-hosted solution.”
Social media is increasingly seen as storytelling media. Much discussion this year has swirled around the storytelling capabilities of social media. Just in the last few weeks, we’ve seen articles like the much-re-tweeted Three Reasons Why Storytelling is the Key to Social Media Marketing Success and slideshows like the one below. Many of the story practitioners in my Q&A series debated the storytelling properties of social media.