21st-Century Storytelling Alive and Well? The Sundance View vs. the MIT Media Lab View

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Today is the last day of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the theme of which is “Storytime.” Although Storytime seems to be more about “the stories — from the screen and from the street — that make Sundance what it is” than about storytelling in films per se, Michelle Meyers, writing on CNET, notes that “the theme … is … apropos considering stories are the heart of each and every film.” She points out the festival’s New Frontier programming category “featuring films that challenge conventional form. Among these is “We Feel Fine,” which I blogged about (sort of) here. As Meyers describes it, In We Feel Fine, programmers Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar have created a program that “takes sentences every few minutes from recently published blogs from around the world that include the words ‘I feel’ or ‘I am feeling’ and visualizes them in six different movements.”

Whether Sundance’s Storytime theme is more suggestive of storytelling in films or narrative about the festival itself, it conveys an optimism about the future of storytelling in film — and in forms (like “We Feel Fine”) closely related to film.

Seemingly not so MIT’s Media Lab (in conjunction with Plymouth Rock Studios), which late last year established The Center for Future Storytelling. In counterpoint to Sundance’s hopeful view of storytelling’s future, the center was founded “out of concern that text messages, cell phones and the constant bombardment of visual chatter and changing the integrity of narrative” and “to keep meaning alive in 21st-century storytelling,” according to Sally Mendzela of Queen of the Playground.

Harkening back to my post yesterday about open-loop storytelling, the center will look at “whether the old way of telling stories — particularly those delivered to the millions on screen, with a beginning, a middle and an end — is in serious trouble,” reports Michael Cieply in the New York Times. Open-ended videogames and film series such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Spider Man seem to be a concern, according to Cieply.

The MIT folks refer to 21st-century storytelling, raising questions about what 21st-century storytelling is. Is it one thing? Is it many things?

Cieply cites film producer and former studio head Peter Guber as worrying that “traditional narrative … has been drowned out by noise and visual clutter” and blames audiences “for the perceived breakdown in narrative quality.”

Coming full circle back to Sundance, I disagree with Guber and agree with the view of Sundance Institute’s Executive Director Ken Brecher, whom Cieply interviewed: “Storytelling is flourishing in the world at a level I can’t even begin to understand,” Cieply quotes Brecher as saying. Cieply also reports Brecher’s view that “technology has simply brought mass storytelling, on film or otherwise, to people who once thought Hollywood had cornered the business.”

You bet storytelling is flourishing! I see that every day as I investigate the story work for this blog.

It’s quite possible, though, that the role of the Center for Future Storytelling has been misunderstood. Indeed, as I read the original press release that MIT issued, I saw no dire concerns about information overload, noise, and clutter. Instead, I saw a vision that actually seems to align with Sundance’s hopeful view of storytelling:

… the [MIT] Media Lab and Plymouth Rock Studios will collaborate revolutionize how we tell our stories, from major motion pictures to peer-to-peer multimedia sharing. By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web.

And the release quotes Frank Moss, Media Lab director and holder of the Jerome Wiesner Professorship of Media Arts and Sciences, as saying:

[Storytelling] is how we share our experiences, learn from our past, and imagine our future. But how we tell our stories depends on another uniquely human characteristic — our ability to invent and harness technology. From the printing press to the Internet, technology has given people new ways to tell their stories, allowing them to reach new levels of creativity and personal fulfillment. The shared vision of the MIT Media Lab and Plymouth Rock Studios allows us to take the next quantum leap in storytelling, empowering ordinary people to connect in extraordinary ways.

Indeed, Rich Kearney, one of the Plymouth Rock Studios folks managing the new center responded to Sally Mendzela’s post with this (run-on sentence) refutation:

… we’re not against new technologies that fragment the audience, one of our main goals is to harness new media to bring storytelling to new heights.

I do not believe storytelling in the 21st century is in trouble. I do believe it is changing, and new forms are evolving. It may be worth asking, however, if stories are losing their meaning when told in some of these new, open-loop forms.

Does Storytelling 2.0 Mean Open Story Loop?

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OK, so technically I have not yet blogged about the concept of “Storytelling 2.0,”* but if you you follow storytelling, you know about Bryan Alexander’s and Alan Levine’s piece by that title in EDUCAUSE Review.

Similarly, Lars Bastholm writes about “Social Storytelling,” which I would consider analogous — or at least closely related to Storytelling 2.0:

Storytelling used to be a closed loop. As Aristotle said: “A story needs to have a beginning, a middle and an end.” Social storytelling flies in the face of that. It is open-ended. The objective is to tell a story in a way that leaves room for the consumers to fill in the blanks, to add their own tendrils to the main storyline.

Bastholm is primarily talking about branded stories in advertising, but I think this open-loop storytelling particularly applies to the types of storytelling we’re seeing in social media and lifestreaming in which we see ongoing snippets that tell people’s stories. Those stories remain open as long as the folks behind them are alive and telling their stories publicly.

I don’t think this kind of open-loop storytelling is unprecedented. The best example I can think of is the soap opera. Story arcs end on soap operas, but the bigger story goes on as long as the soap opera goes on. Sure, many soaps end, but others, like “Guiding Light,” are still going strong after 50+ years.

What other examples of open-loop storytelling are out there? Is there a downside to this kind of storytelling?

*I will eventually blog about Storytelling 2.0. It’s one of those topics that so excites me that I want to make sure I do it justice.

In the meantime, stay tuned tomorrow for a post that relates to the open story loop.

Build a Story, Build a World?

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Read an interesting, thought-provoking, lengthy blog post by Austin Kleon from last fall in which he equates storytelling with “world-building.” His argument reminded me of my musings from a few weeks ago in which I questioned whether digital storytelling is a genre or form of applied storytelling as opposed to a medium for rendering storytelling. When Kleon says, “my argument is that the artist can see written fiction, comics, and film as multiple disciplines on the spectrum of storytelling,” it sounds as though he’s saying that fiction, comics, and film also are tools for telling stories rather then genres of storytelling themselves.

But Kleon’s real point is even more interesting. Now, granted, he’s talking about fiction, comics, and film — a bit outside the main applied-storytelling focus of A Storied Career — but it’s fascinating to think about whether this world-building concept connects to applied storytelling. Again, his piece was quite lengthy (as blog posts go), and the final paragraph that I’m excerpting below probably doesn’t do the full post justice, but here it is:

Although [artists] all have different ideas about what a story is and how you build and present a story, if we accept that what each discipline does is world-build, then we can use the term “world-building” to move fluidly between disciplines. When we have the world-building tools and processes mastered from multiple disciplines of storytelling — whether it be drawing in the case of comics, or writing in the case of fiction — we can use these tools and processes across disciplines to generate the worlds that we imagine.

This concept was reinforced when my best friend e-mailed me recently to say: “Once in awhile I get really carried away by a movie or TV show or book and can’t stop thinking about the fictional world.”

To what extent do applied-storytelling practitioners create worlds with the stories they tell? Think about stories you’re worked with and consider what “worlds” they may have created. Discuss.

Storytelling Adds Human Touch to Virtual Work

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I got interested in virtual teams and virtual work a few years ago when I learned that some of my former students felt that, while their business-school education had prepared them well to collaborate in face-to-face teams, it fell short in readying them to participate on geographically dispersed teams in which very little interaction was face-to-face. As a result of this finding, I developed a well-received virtual-teams project in my business-communication classes. It was at about this same time that my interest in storytelling was burgeoning; thus, I’m quite interested in convergences between virtual work and storytelling.

That’s one reason I was so delighted when I discovered that Jessica Lipnack, co-author of probably the definitive book on virtual teams, was also a member of Worldwide Story Work. In her Q&A with A Storied Career, she discussed the value of storytelling in virtual teams.

Here’s another bit of reinforcement for the idea that these two practices should go hand-in-hand. It’s from the Virtual Meetings Success blog (I could not identify an author on the site):

… hold your virtual meetings with a human touch. This human touch includes telling stories, which stick.

Effective storytelling in virtual meetings is the key to highly productive, relationship-focused, business meetings.

This is exactly what people do when they meet in person. We tell tales. If you think back to your favorite boss or most-admired leader, I bet this is a quality they had. They could tell stories. Stories with a message. Stories, which inspire. And stories you still remember, many years later.

If you want to recreate the intimacy of meeting face-to-face with your team, learn to tell emotional stories. If you want to increase collaboration in your virtual team meetings, encourage participants to tell stories.

Well-told stories help build rapport and trust in distance teams.

The current economy will likely see a surge in virtual work and telecommuting. Tools to ease the stress of this work are indeed valuable.

One Example of What a Lifestream Might Look Like … and a Bunch of Resources

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Not long ago, I blogged about lifestreaming, the concept of aggregating various forms of one’s social-media participation into some sort of cohesive format, and thus into some semblance of a story about yourself.

Apparently WordPress has a Lifestream plug-in (ahem, got anything like that, Movable Type?), which Mark Krynsky uses on his site krynsky.com. Here’s what one from last week looks like:

I believe you can find any of his lifestreams by tweaking this URL with the date you’re looking for: http://krynsky.com/my-lifestream-for-2009-01-12/

In the process of checking out Krynsky’s lifestream, I uncovered a vast trove of lifestreaming resources at his other site, Lifestream Blog. He’s got categorized lists of sites and services that can be used as sources to build your Lifestream, a list of resources that can be used to create a Lifestream, a grid matrix that compares each of the Lifestreaming services on their feature sets, screen shots of Krynsky’s Lifestream at various online services (for me, the screenshots did not load), a directory of people’s Lifestreams, notable posts (stories!) regarding the Lifestream concept, a terrific About page that defines and discusses the Lifestream concept (Krynsky’s definition: “a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline… limited [only] by the content and sources that you use to define it.”)

I am increasingly convinced that lifestreaming is storytelling. I’m excited.

PS: Krynsky and I must be on some of thew same e-mail lists because he also touts on his Lifestream blog the lifestreaming venue Storytlr, which I’ve blogged about here. Krynsky is excited about new Storytlr features, such as the addition of Facebook, Laconi.ca Identi.ca, StumbleUpon, Twitpic, Tumblr and Vimeo; automatic crossposting of any source to Twitter; an available bookmarklet to post Storytlr items; the ability to embed widgets and stories in your blog; and new templates and “design your own.”

My Inauguration Story

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1:05 p.m.: I’ve been watching coverage since a little after 7 a.m. Barack Obama has now been our president for a little over an hour. It’s a day of great emotion, and I wish I could blog in front of the TV, but my laptop chose today to commit suicide.

Just a few impressions: As was the case on election night, I have been most struck by the people — the people filling the National Mall to capacity by 9 a.m. — just the absolute sea of hopeful humanity that our new president looked out on this afternoon.

It was those people I thought of when the president said: “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them…” Those people are the living testament to that shift.

I hope to update this entry throughout today, Inauguration Day, with my impressions of the inauguration of our 44th president. (This effort has just been slightly hampered by an apparent hard-drive failure on my laptop.)

For starters, two organizations are seeking photos to tell the story of the day: E-mail DemocracyforAmerica.com and go to the Presidential Inauguration Committee’s Web site.

Starting at 10 a.m. today, DemocracyforAmerica.com will host a live inauguration slideshow photo album highlighting members from all over the country at thousands of DFA events and parties nationwide:

No matter where you are — whether at a gathering in your office break room, hosting a watch party in your living room, or out drinking with your friends — we’ll instantly capture this moment together.

    There are at least three easy ways to submit your photos:

  1. Cell-phone camera (Yes It Can!)
  2. iPhone, Smartphone, or Blackberry
  3. Digital camera

Real-Time Storytelling

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Chris Brogan earlier this month raised the question: “How have (or how can) you use social media tools in real time to capture the stories around us, in whatever form you want?”

The example Brogan used was being at a Panasonic press conference at a larger convention and sending out dispatches via Twitter (“live-tweeting”) about the press event in real time (while other journalists took notes on paper to write their stories later). Brogan noted that not only did bloggers/tweeters scoop the notepad journalists but that they started a conversation.

A superb recent example is the Hudson River plane-crash photo that Janis Krums (who is apparently a guy) of Sarasota, FL, took on his cell phone (iPhone to be precise) and posted to Twitter more or less in real time last week.

Tomorrow’s inauguration provides a great opportunity to tell stories in real time. I’ll be doing close to that — periodically blogging my impressions of this momentous day.

One commenter to Brogan’s piece, “Zoe,” noted that she’d heard a podcast with Clay Shirker, who “pointed out that ‘Is this journalism?’ is not the question — the question is whether or not we are getting information to the people. I think this distinction allows us to get past superficial distinctions, and embrace things like real-time storytelling.”

A ton of journalism will be happening tomorrow. But I suspect there will be even more real-time storytelling. One is not better than the other, but real-time storytelling can certainly be more personal and immediate.

(I should add here that technology may fail to support all the live storytelling; Matt Richtel reported in today’s New York Times that: “The cellphone industry has a plea for the throngs descending on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration: go easy on the mobile communications. Cellphone companies have added temporary antennas in Washington but expect to be overwhelmed anyway.”)

Another commenter said that this kind of real-time news dissemination is not storytelling because “storytelling connotes longer narratives.” I disagree. If you look at, for example, the six-word memoirs at SMITH Magazine, a 140-character Tweet seems like War and Peace. (OK, maybe comparing words to characters is like apples to oranges, but the point is, you can say a lot in 140 characters.)

Q&A Series on Hiatus Until March 2

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The first phase of my Q&A series with story practitioners has now concluded.

The Q&A cupboard is almost bare. An additional two dozen gurus have committed to providing responses to my questions, but I’m committed to remaining flexible with deadlines since I know everyone is busy. And 21 must be a significant number (21 Q&As have appeared so far) because I just invited another 21 story experts to participate. I welcome your suggestions for possible interviewees.

The series is now on hiatus until March 2 when Phase II will kick off with a Q&A with Michael Margolis.

If you missed any of the first 21 interviews, you can see them here.

Social Media Resume Can Help Tell Your Story

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I was quite tickled last week and felt I’d made the bigtime when Dan Schawbel mentioned my social-media resume on Mashable (along with his own and several others). I first blogged about my social-media resume almost exactly a year ago.

I created my social-media resume partly because I saw that others had them, and I thought they were cool. My other motivation was experimental/research. I wanted to see what would happen if I joined as many social networks as possible and then aggregated my membership in them (to the degree possible) in one place. One problem was that I set aside a full day to join a bunch off social networks — but that chunk of time wasn’t nearly enough to create the kind of comprehensive profiles the various venues wanted — let alone maintain those profiles.

In looking at some of the other social-media resumes that Dan cites, I now see greater possibilities for actual job search, personal branding, and career advancement — not just aggregating all the venues I belong to.

Here are the advantages, according to Dan:

Social media resumes are important for attracting hiring managers directly to you, without you having to submit your resume, blindly, to them. … With a social media resume, you’re able to paint a completely different portrait of yourself for hiring managers and customize it to reflect your personal brand. With the inclusion of various multimedia elements, sharing options, integrated social networking feeds and the same elements you’d find in a traditional resume, you are better equipped for success.

“Paint a completely different portrait of yourself” sounds a like like “Tell a story of yourself,” doesn’t it?

Seeing the other sample social-media resumes Dan mentions gives me good ideas for improving mine (like using one’s LinkedIn Profile as a executive summary).

I’m also really excited about Dan’s forthcoming book, Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success. I believe I will find some interesting convergences among “Me 2.0” and career storytelling and storytelling for identity construction.

Do check out Dan’s article if you have any interest in your own social-media resume as it is a comprehensive how-to.