See a photo of Cathryn, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.
Q&A with Cathryn Wellner, Question 3:
Q: The culture is abuzz about Web 2.0 and social media. To what extent do you participate in social media (such as through LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Second Life, blogs, etc.)? To what extent and in what ways do you feel these venues are storytelling media?
A: I’m a fan of social media. I belong to several Ning [groups], am on Facebook, write three blogs, and read others. I’m on Twitter but don’t refer to it a lot. On the other hand, I check out YouTube regularly and Vimeo and other video sites occasionally. I get tons of ideas from all of them, more than I can use on my blogs. I also make good contacts on them. And I generally keep my usage in check so as to be able to be productive rather than just be a consumer of other people’s stories.
For me, they are all storytelling media. Over the years I’ve been part of the ongoing conversation concerning how we define stories. But I’ve been only a small part of the conversation because I haven’t found it useful to my own work.
I define storytelling very loosely, if at all. What interests me is how we
are affected by the Big Ideas we absorb from our cultures and how they influence the way we act in the world. I call those Big Ideas stories because abstractions have less power over us than stories. So we tell stories to support our world view and have a hard time recognizing that the totality of our life experience shapes what we think, say, and do. We can’t step outside our minds and see the world totally fresh.
The various social media are a means of entering the world of story from different points. We can assume an avatar and jump into Second Life. We can try out a new story and test it on Twitter or Facebook. We can blog a different perspective and see who responds, and how. We can invent our professional persona on LinkedIn.
To me, it’s all part of the larger arena of storytelling. If we don’t fall into the trap of becoming an observer, if we actually engage and become creative contributors, we can experiment with creating new stories.
And perhaps we can be part of creating the new story that will persuade us to take care of our planet.