See a photo of Steve, his bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.
Q&A with Steve Spalding, 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: Everything is a storytelling medium.
A blog is a vehicle for stories. A greeting card is a vehicle for stories, and so are Aunt Ethel’s home movies. Social media is where I live, and if it has taught me anything at all, it’s that if you give people the tools they will use them almost exclusively to tell stories.
Sometimes these stories amount to little more than screeds about taking
showers and going to dog parks, but in some cases you hear some really gripping stuff, like when we learned about the geopolitical crisis in Iran during the election on Twitter or the hundreds of videos about cutting-edge research that find their way onto major universities’ YouTube channels.
We live in a world where we have, for the first time, turned the camera on ourselves and given everyone the ability to tell the world every, little detail about their lives. It’s really no surprise that so many of us are using these tools to tell stories. We do well to recognize this fact and take notice.