Two notable back-to-back story events coming up:

Jill Golick is organizing a Social Media Week Story Project, Social Media Week being Feb. 1-5. Golick wants to “use the social media to tell some stories about how social media are affecting relationships” and is recruiting writers, actors, designers and other interested collaborators to “put together a story room … to turn … data into story arcs.” Then, Golick wants to “have each writer create a character on the web using social media tools like blogs, social bookmarking, FriendFeed and Twitter. They can cast actors to ‘play’ their character in profile pictures, photo albums and other media they may develop.”

“During Social Media Week,” Golick says, participants can “play out the stories of our characters through their social networking activities.” She invites interested folks to e-mail her.

Then, on Feb. 6, Noa Baum (pictured), whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the 2009 Golden Fleece Conference last April, is holding an all-day seminar called “Your Life’s Story and the Legacy You Leave” under the auspices of the Smithsonian Resident Associate Program.

Some snippets from the seminar description:

Noa Baum shows how to shape memories into a personal narrative and how to reveal underlying universal themes.

The morning session provides an introduction to the oral tradition of storytelling as the oldest tool for transmitting wisdom and values from one generation to the next. After lunch, participants learn techniques for deepening and expanding the images within their stories, exploring the connections between personal narratives and universal archetypes. They also explore the role of the listener in shaping a story and learn how to interact with their listeners to gain insight into how stories become legacies.

Go here to reserve a spot in the seminar, which is held in Washington DC, at the S. Dillon Ripley Center of the Smithsonian.

Thanks to Thaler Pekar for alerting me to this one.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

It’s been almost two months since my last roundup of storytelling tweets that enjoyed significant buzz in the Twitterverse. Time to look at what folks think is worth re-tweeting in the storytelling world:

• The book Why Now Is the Time Crush It! Cash in on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk has its own hashtag, #crushit, on Twitter, and one tweeter said his/her favorite line from the book is: “Storytelling is by far the most underrated skill in business.”
• Another quote I like, which comes from @jonbuscall via @rbrtstar: “All media is storytelling media — web 2.0 makes stories independent of space and time.”
• Much talked about on Twitter in the last month or so has been Michael Margolis’s terrific book, Believe Me:

“Does your Innovation have a story?” by Jeffrey Phillips

Guy Kawasaki’s recommendation of Michelle James’s interview with Michael, “The importance of storytelling in creative leadership: An interview with Michael Margolis.”

• An article in the Los Angeles Times, “‘Transmedia’: A brave new world in entertainment marketing,” about transmedia guru Henry Jenkins teaching this topic at the University of Southern California, proved buzzworthy.
• Much talked about was Beth Kanter’s article Multi-Channel Fundraising Campaigns: Storytelling Is Key, which in turn cited the blog entry “What Story Are You Telling Your Donors, Where Are You Telling It?” by Thomas Negron. Negron reported on presentations at the NYC chapter of NTEN’s 501 Tech Club that included Rebecca Willett of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Kanter includes Willett’s slide deck in her post. “The point of [Negron’s] post is that good storytelling is the heart and soul of donor solicitations,” Kanter writes, “and a consistent story must be told across all donor touch points.” She quotes Negron: “This presents a wonderful opportunity because every time a donor interacts with your organization it is a chance to share another aspect of your story and reiterate the work they make possible.”
• A tweeter suggested that a Google Search can tell a story, as in this video, “Parisian Love”.
• In the great PowerPoint vs. storied presentations discussion, Prezi and Ahead were cited in the Twitterverse as two good alternatives to PowerPoint because they “make you think about concepts, not serial slides.

• Finally, and not necessarily buzzworthy, I came across a Web application, TweetCloud that creates a cloud of the words one tweets the most over a given period. At left is @AStoriedCareer’s tweet cloud for the last year. No surprises on the big words; perhaps a few surprises on the smaller ones.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Ben Macintyre’s Times of London article from two weeks ago, The internet is killing storytelling continues to generate huge buzz on Twitter, and I expected to vehemently disagree with it. But I surprised myself by acknowledging that Macintyre has a few good points.

First, I like the staccato spew of his opening salvo:

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

I also admit that the Internet has diminished my attention span. I find it harder and harder to summon the patience to read longer newspaper and magazine stories these days — like Nicholas Carr’s experience that Macintryre describes:

[Atlantic Monthly essayist Nicholas Carr] admitted that he can no longer immerse himself in substantial books and longer articles in the way he once did. “What the net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swift-moving stream of particles.”

Thus, I can’t completely disagree with Macintyre’s claim: “If the culprit is obvious, so is the primary victim of this radically reduced attention span: the narrative, the long-form story, the tale. … Very few stories of more than 1,000 words achieve viral status on the internet.” This last statement is probably true, though Macintyre offers no evidence. (Stephanie West Allen cited this blog entry in which David DiSalvo points out the lack of any citations that support Macintyre’s assertions.)

But here’s where we start to part ways. Macintryre writes: “The blog is a soap box, not a story. Facebook is a place for tell-tales perhaps, but not for telling tales.” Sure, that’s true of some blogs — but many others are wonderful venues for storytelling, providing a storied outlet for both writers and readers that didn’t exist 15 years ago. And while storytelling on Facebook may be flawed, millions more people are telling and reading stories than did before the age of social media.

I disagree with Macintyre’s assertion that Internet storytelling is not nourishing us. The vast variety of ways the Internet has opened up for people to tell stories has led not to an anorexic culture but one confronting a Thanksgiving feast of story possibilities:

The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative. The consequence is an anorexic form of culture.

I certainly agree with these assertions by Macintyre — except for the “paradoxically” part. Since we do hunger in unprecedented ways for stories, it is not at all paradoxical that the Internet has provided vast, unprecedented, and varied tools and venues for storytelling:

Paradoxically, there has never been a greater hunger for narrative, for stories that give shape and meaning to experience. .. Our fascination with other people’s stories is as great, if not greater, than any time in history.

In a blog entry, Dan Conover, Joel Achenbach and Deborah Potter on storytelling, responding to a different piece written before Macintyre’s piece ever appeared, Deborah Potter wrote:

… is Twitter a threat to storytelling? Of course not. And not just for the obvious reason that Twitter is an entirely different medium from long-form narrative. It’s never going to replace good writing. Checking a Twitter stream is an entirely different experience from curling up with a good book, and most serious readers — even those who are also avid tweeters — wouldn’t trade one for the other. But here the real reason Twitter isn’t a threat to storytelling: Twitter can make writing better.

So, two more points to counter Macintyre’s argument: There’s still plenty of room for long-form narrative in people’s lives, and sometimes less is more. Where is it written that stories must be long to be good?

Jean Marie Tenlen responded to Macintyre’s essay with a blog entry carrying examples “to illuminate the multiple layers of narrative that the Internet enables.”

Macintyre’s piece also sparked discussion on Golden Fleece’s Working Stories discussion list. A few excerpts:

I don’t agree. That’s like saying sex is killing love.

— Seth Kahan, president, Performance Development Group, Inc.

A similar perspective as this article was posited by a well known neuroscientist (who I remember had a grand title but I don’t remember her name) from the UK who said that gaming was killing social capabilities. It was a TV report and I laughed to myself when they cut to four young guys in an in-depth conversation about how to best make progress in one of the latest video games. Seemed like there was plenty of socialising happen and the game was the trigger.

— Shawn Callahan, Anecdote

… my teenage kids are just as likely to read Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc as they are to spend time on Facebook and IM’ing. In fact, they spend hours IM’ing, which seems to me to be the modern equivalent of hours on the phone. They spend just as much time gossiping (telling each other stories) as I did as a teenager. They watch movies, and as I said, they also read books. Long books with intricate plots that carry through the series. They don’t like reading most of the texts they are given to read for school. So what exactly is different? … WIth email, I write more than I did before email. I send friends interesting stuff about our travels, before it was what would fit on a postcard. So technology has helped me write more stories, well, personal stories. If we are talking about literature, well no, technology hasn’t added to me reading anymore than I did before the internet came along. But then it hasn’t reduced it either. I read when I am interested, I stop reading when I lose interest. I don’t think my level of interest, or attention span has changed as a result.

— Melanie White

What forms and venues for storytelling — as well as levels of storytelling participation — were unimaginable before the Internet?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Do you know the story of rabbit, rabbit day? Neither does anyone else according to Wikipedia, yet millions say some variation of “rabbit, rabbit” on the first day of every month. I never knew about this tradition until I married my husband, in whose family of origin the habit is well-entrenched. Here’s what Wikipedia says about “rabbit, rabbit day:”

“Rabbit rabbit white rabbit” is a common superstition. The most common modern version states that a person should say “rabbit, rabbit, white rabbit” or simply “rabbit, rabbit” upon waking on the first day of each new month, and on doing so will receive good luck for the duration of that month. … The exact origin of the superstition is unknown, though it has appeared in print at least as early as 1954 in Bromley, Kent, where it is most commonly said to have originated, though some reports place its origins even earlier, into the 1800s. Today it has spread to most of the English-speaking countries of the world, although like all folklore, determining its exact area of distribution is difficult. This superstition is related to the broader belief in the rabbit or hare being a “lucky” animal, as exhibited in the practice of carrying a rabbit’s foot for luck. Some have also believed it is representing a jumping into the future and moving ahead with life and happiness.

A friend of one of my Facebook friends told this story today:

I had a 4th grade teacher that would march us into her teacher friend’s classroom on the first day of every month to jump up and down and shout “rabbit day!” three times, and then turn and march out.

Anyhoo … it’s a good day to report on which items related to storytelling have attained the most buzz on Twitter since my last report about six weeks ago:

• I wrote about Waterlife before in connection with “database storytelling” (which is still a mystery); this presentation got lots of buzz on Twitter.
• A video that previews a Nov. 19 conference in London called Creativity and Technology is titled CaT Video: The Storytelling Throwdown: Is technology changing brand storytelling? and was much-retweeted. [Disclaimer: Because it’s more than 20 minutes long, I haven’t yet had the chance to watch it.]
• Much buzz focused on Adam Westbrook’s blog post on 6×6 storytelling for freelance journalists, the third in a series of six blog posts, each with six tips for the next generation of freelance multimedia journalists, in which Westbrook wrote:

  A lot of the focus for multimedia journalists and digital journalists has been on new technology: using Twitter, learning Flash. But there’s a danger that in the rush to learn new skills, we forgot (or never learn) the oldest ones. And there is no skill older, or more important, than storytelling.

• Every month in the Twitterverse, it seems at least one movie is cited for excellent storytelling. Since my last compilation, three films have enjoyed storytelling accolades — two with “9” in the title, 9 and District 9, along with Inglorious Basterds. One movie, Extract, was cited for weak storytelling.

• Following the death of Ted Kennedy, The Boston Globe’s tribute was cited as a great example of multimedia storytelling.
• This same kind of storytelling — for magazines — attained much traction based on the article, Magazines Need to Embrace Multimedia Storytelling in Digital Age, an interview by Mark Glaser on Mediashift with Jim Gaines of Flyp Media, “an online publisher of magazine-style content that combines video, audio, Flash animations and interactive features.”

• A new collaborative storytelling tool, Storybird, got lots of buzz. The tool targets narrative artists, families, writers, and educators. “Storybirds are short, visual stories that you make with family and friends to share.”
• I helped promote Cathie Dodds’ Labor Day Twitterthon, designed to “see if it was possible to tell your story with Twitter,” and the results were significantly retweeted.
• I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about transmedia storytelling recently, in part because this story form has garnered so much attention, such as in the article, The revolutionary power of transmedia storytelling.
• And finally, my friend Tom Clifford enjoyed well-deserved retweets of his Three Keys to Good Storytelling, a guest post from Bluedot Productions, the filmmakers behind the documentary, The Quantum Activist.

Make it a good Rabbit Rabbit day!

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

SMITH Magazine and PBS FRONTLINE/Digital Nation want to hear your stories about life in the digital age. In six words, the sponsors would like to know how the web and digital technology are changing how you think, work, live, or love. Has something you’ve posted online come back to haunt you? Would you “Friend” your kid on Facebook? Whether you’ve done things unimaginable just a few years ago (“I have even Twittered during sex”) or are trying to make sense of how rapidly the world is changing (“Dull persona. Second Life ego enormous”), we want to hear who you are, in your digital life, in six well-chosen words. You could win a DVD collection of FRONTLINE films.

Details and story-collection point here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Cathie Dodd’s Storytelling Twitterthon begins at 6 am PST Labor Fay, Sept. 7.

Says Cathie:

Start sharing sharing your personal stories. It will be going all day,so whenever you have a moment stop by and be apart of it. Some have already started sharing their stories. Just go to Twitter and when you update your status you write your story and put this in the as the hash tag to type #TOJStory. If you want to see what everyone is writing , search the hash tag.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Cathie Dodd, one of the subjects of my Q&A series is trying a storytelling Twitterthon on Monday, September 7, Labor Day in the US, from 6:00 am - 9:00 pm PDT.

You can RSVP and see more info here on Facebook. Looks like you need to friend Cathie on Facebook or follow her on Twitter to participate.

Here’s how she describes it:

This is an experiment I want to do with all my contacts on Facebook and Twitter. I am creating a storytelling Twitterthon. It will be all day Monday. Since most of you are off of work, maybe you can stop by tweet on twitter and tell us a short story about yourself.

This is how it works. Put in the hash tag before your tweet : #TOJStory and then with the rest of the 140 characters share one story, or a number of stories about yourself.

For those who take part in the twitterthon, I will be printing all the replies on my website next week. I will post the link in my group. You can also read the stories submitted by searching the hash tag on Twitter

For those unfamiliar with hash tags just remember that before you write in the twitter box, you write #TOJStory to be considered part of the Twitterthon.

Cathie Dodd AKA twitter name: @Tearsofjoy

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve been seeing and thinking recently a lot about the terms:

• cross-media storytelling
• transmedia storytelling
• immersive storytelling
• distributed storytelling

As I read about these terms, they all seem to be talking about roughly the same thing. I figured if anyone knew about the nuances of difference among the terms, it would be Christy Dena, who has focused her doctoral studies on what she describes as “a new form of storytelling & gaming” (which, I believe, she is currently calling “cross-platform” storytelling).

Indeed, she does offer an answer, and my puny list above, it turns out, is just the tip of the iceberg. Christy provides a lengthy list of terms that she states are either the equivalent or sub-sets of cross-media.

I don’t want to steal her thunder by repeating the whole list — and I also tend to shun those that directly reference games because I’m just not into games — so here’s a very abbreviated version of her list (in addition to those at the top of this entry):

• Convergent Storytelling
• Distributed Narratives
• Intermedia Storytelling
• Mobile Narratives
• Multimedia Stories
• Multi-Platform Storytelling
• Polymorphic Fictions
• Situated Narratives
• Synergistic Storyscapes
• Synergistic Storytelling

I find these genres fascinating and keep wondering what applications they may have beyond what we’ve already seen. But before I get into that, it’s useful to come up with some sort of definition and basic understanding.

Henry Jenkins, who champions the term “transmedia storytelling,” offers a good explanation in the video I embedded here. Jenkins also offers a good definition, explanation, and copious resources in the Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment Syllabus for the course he’s teaching this fall at USC, which he posted on his blog:

We now live at a moment where every story, image, brand, relationship plays itself out across the maximum number of media platforms, shaped top down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenager’s bedrooms. The concentrated ownership of media conglomerates increases the desirability of properties that can exploit “synergies” between different parts of the medium system and “maximize touch-points” with different niches of consumers. The result has been the push towards franchise-building in general and transmedia entertainment in particular.

A transmedia story represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from television into comics, the web, computer or alternate reality games, toys and other commodities, and so forth, picking up new consumers as it goes and allowing the most dedicated fans to drill deeper. The fans, in turn, may translate their interests in the franchise into concordances and wikipedia entries, fan fiction, vids, fan films, cosplay, game mods, and a range of other participatory practices that further extend the story world in new directions. Both the commercial and grassroots expansion of narrative universes contribute to a new mode of storytelling, one which is based on an encyclopedic expanse of information which gets put together differently by each individual consumer as well as processed collectively by social networks and online knowledge communities.

The Blair Witch Project and The Matrix are often cited as seminal examples that spawned transmedia storytelling. And just as an aside, a wonderful piece from five years ago — a great story of storytelling — is Exocog: A case study of a new genre in storytelling (back when transmedia/cross-media/immersive storytelling was indeed a new genre) about a transmedia project undertaken independently of a film studio — yet as an extension of the film Minority Report. The project was something like what Jenkins calls a “grassroots extension,” except that the organizers were not “fans” per se. Jim Miller, who wrote the piece, cites the old Apple HyperCard program as one of the earliest roots of using computers and the Internet for storytelling. I never grasped HyperCard yet thought it was cool.

Given that I’m not into games and that storytelling in movies and TV is also not at the top of my list of interests (mostly because other writers/bloggers have those genres well covered), I’m interested in other applications that transmedia/cross-media/immersive storytelling may have. Can they be used for nonfiction stories and for individuals (say, in job-hunting and personal branding)?

John Thompson, senior copywriter at One to One Interactive, answers the nonfiction question when he cites “one of the most successful social media-enabled stories going — the Obama presidency.”

Emerging multimedia journalism also is applying transmedia/cross-media/immersive storytelling to nonfiction. With regard to the way the aftermath of the Iran elections was covered through social media, Brad King writes:

… in this distributed world, the best storytellers should be out there aggregating all the information, creating pages where the information can be pulled, mapped and searched in a variety of manners; where information can be set up top by users; and then knowledgeable folks can provide their own context to what is happening.

(King is concerned both with the way this kind of storytelling should be archived and the perils of “remixing” storytelling that result in incidents such as Maureen Dowd’s failure to attribute a paragraph in her column to its rightful source.

And Kfir Pravda flirts with the individual question by writing:

Immersive storytelling is the use of social web and online video to tell a linear fictional story, through the social activities of the characters. … but what about the stories that happen to people around us? People in real life? Did you ever read someone’s Facebook status messages and learned about his personal stories through it? Did you ever read personal blogs and vlogs and felt that you are witnessing a real life story? This is the basic concept of immersive storytelling — the movie theater is replaced by Facebook and Twitter profiles, blogs, and personal vblogs.

So, we can probably say that some people are heavily involved in transmedia/cross-media/immersive storytelling by having personal Web sites, blogs, videos of themselves of YouTube, photos on Flickr, profiles on Facebook and Twitter, and so on. Various feeds, lifestreams, and storystreams are likely a good way for these various media to tell the individual’s story cohesively. For functions like personal branding and job-seeking, a certain degree of linearity is probably desirable.

And perhaps a degree of interaction is desirable. I’ve written before about Kevin Sablan, whose “storystreaming” vision focuses on how others interact with the story’s protagonist: “every story includes multiple characters, events and plot. A storystream platform needs to document a the events of a story, not a person.”

Although “Johnny Blank” (“a storyteller hell bent on discovering ways to harness emerging technologies to share stories with new audiences”) writes in the context of film and blurring the lines between filmmaker and audience, his words apply to those interested in telling — and participating in — nonfiction and individual stories acorss platforms:

For the first time since ancient cultures, where stories were passed down from generation to generation through verbal communication (around fires etc), the world has now found a new, communal space to share and grow its stories that represent humanity. … In other words, stories are no longer simply stories, they are world views that will evolve with discussion, creation, and review.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

“One thing that people ask me all the time is: ‘is storytelling dying?’” said Dale Jarvis, the Intangible Cultural Heritage development officer for Newfoundland, in a transcript of a podcast interview on PreservationToday.com

I know what Dale’s talking about. I constantly see articles lamenting “the lost (or dying) art of storytelling.” Maybe it’s because I am acutely tuned in to storytelling, but “lost” and “dying” are the last adjectives I would apply to storytelling.

Dale’s response:

I really believe that things are always in a constant state of evolution. I think traditions are always changing, and I think that the rise of things like YouTube indicate that people are really passionate about storytelling. They really want to share their own personal stories.

So, it is sort of a really great democratization of storytelling in a way. Maybe people don’t sit around and tell the long-form fairy tales in quite the same way that they used to, but people are incredibly interested in sharing their own personal stories and creating stories and sharing them.

Yes. On Friday, I talked about this phenomenon particularly with regard to blogging. In that entry, I quoted academician Cynthia Franklin: “I argue that blogs are serving as a kind of ‘memoir-on-the-go…”

Here are a few more examples of blogs that are “memoirs on the go” (suggested by Joel Kelly on Ingenioustries in an entry entitled The keys to a storytelling blog:

• The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, the blog of Jelisa “J-Money” Castrodale, “a freelance writer and stand-up comic who is fueled by an enamel-eroding Diet Coke habit and an insane love of music, both of which put her in the categories of ‘good at Jeopardy!’ and ‘annoying to have at parties.’” Kelly describes the blog like this: ” The story is Jelisa’s life. We know she’s kind of broke, loves running, and has had plenty of hilarious dating misadventures. And she’s trying to get more professional writing work. The content [comprises] her posts about what goes on in her life.”
• Gaping Void, the blog of Hugh McLeod, a cartoonist who sells limited-edition prints, published a book in June (which as of today, Aug. 17, is No. 1 in Amazon’s “creativity” category. He is also CEO of Stormhoek USA, a small wine brand out of South Africa, which just launched in America. Kelly says: “The story is Hugh living in Alpine, Texas, doing some futile marketing and making awesome artwork after having been a traditional ad man for 10 years. The content [comprises] his cartoons and marketing insights (often the same thing).”
• Vegan Dad, who describes his blog this way: “When you have kids, supper has to be on the table every night. And when you are a vegan, the drive-thru, the deli counter, and TV dinners/frozen convenience foods are not an option. So, you do the best you can. This blog is a record of what my family eats. It’s not always a totally complete meal, not always photogenic, and sometimes it’s leftovers. But, it is a realistic look at a vegan family in a northern Ontario city that is not always vegan-friendly.” Kelly: “Story — A, well, vegan dad who wants his family to be healthy and eat great food. He’s got a few boys and a brand new vegan daughter, and he wants to share the cool food he makes for them with other vegans. Content — Amazing recipes. They’re usually fairly simple because we know from the overall story that he’s a busy guy.”

• Maximum Fun, of which Kelly say: “Story — Jesse Thorn, 28, is living his dream of hosting a public radio show (and podcasts), despite the odds (it doesn’t really make him much money). He struggles, he finds success, and you’re on the journey with him of living his dream. Content — The episodes and blog posts themselves. The things he creates and controls. Each episode of his show or podcasts are framed by the fact that he’s young, fairly broke, but having a huge amount of fun interviewing his heroes and hanging out with his friends.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Time for my monthly look at storytelling zeitgeist in Twitterland. Here are items that have gained significant attention:

• Add to the annals of Twitter storytelling, Columbus across the Atlantic, in which Chuck Steele is “twittering the ship’s log of Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the New World.”

• An Ad Age article discusses the storytelling of the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man” campaign: Awesome storytelling bringing awesome results. The Most Interesting Ad Campaign gets results.
• Much laud for the storytelling prowess of Frank McCourt after his recent death made its way to the Twitterverse.
• Henry Jenkins’s video on transmedia storytelling and convergence culture (below) was significantly re-tweeted. Good stuff!

Henry Jenkins on Transmedia - November 2009 from niko on Vimeo.

• Yikes! Is “storytelling” merely a buzzword? @lindadong tweeted: “I’m so sick of buzzwords. No more ‘innovation’ ‘storytelling’ ‘experience’ or ‘usability’”!
• I liked this quote from Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri that Scott Zeitz tweeted: “The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.”
• Storytelling practitioners and fans will find familiar material in The Need for Storytelling Skills on Silvia Tolisano’s Langwitches blog. These four summary points suggest reasons we need storytelling skills, an argument author Lori Silverman crusades for:
1. There is more INFORMATION out there than ever before in human history. We (and our students) need to learn how to find, evaluate and make sense out of all this information that we are bombarded with through many types of different media.
2. WHAT HAPPENS when we have obtained this/these information/facts? What do we do with it? How will we remember? How will we archive for future retrieval?
3. It is precisely THAT ability (organize/connect/remix/create) that we need to foster in ourselves and our students . The ability to put these facts in context. The amount of facts alone (without context) just overwhelms us.
4. Storytelling (putting information in a narrative context) might be the answer to our need to make sense of this vast information that is available to us anytime, anywhere and anyhow.
• This technically multifaceted site from Louis Vuitton, A Journey Beyond, “connects history, storytelling, and the thrill of a journey with an iconic brand.” It presents perspectives from astronauts Jim Lovell, Buzz Aldrin, and Sally Ride. My laptop couldn’t quite handle the technical requirements, so I didn’t see too much. The site is impressive, but I didn’t see enough to form an opinion on the storytelling.
• A re-tweeted TED talk was characterized as explaining why storytelling needs interactive imagery. In the talk, information designer Tom Wujec talks through three areas of the brain that help us understand words, images, feelings, connections. …he asks: How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big ideas?
• Another quote I liked, this one from @KathySierra: “Don’t learn PPT/Keynote, learn how the brain works. Learn storytelling. Study filmmaking. Apply learning theory. Inspire.”
• This piece by Melinda Partin from Fast Company garnered attention: Brand Storytelling: Connecting With Your Audience. She describes a storytelling ad her company created:

  … When sharing the story of the AT&T 8525 by HTC, a Windows Mobile smartphone, we targeted harried business people who needed real-time access to their productivity tools, such as email and Microsoft Office programs, at all times. An out-of-home campaign in airports, subway stations and table trays on Alaska Airlines jets showed how the 8525 kept users calmly connected, as if they were sitting in their offices. An emotional need was met — to stay calm and connected — while the consumer was actually in a usually stressful travel environment.

• In Storytelling tools: Audit Your Intellectual Capital — 7 Ways to Find Your Stories, Elizabeth Sosnow raises the specter that corporate entities trying to promote themselves in social-media communities face “story fatigue.”

• Another technologically and visually stunning Flash site, The Ropewalker created Twitter buzz for “really slick storytelling.”
• Yet another good quote, which I believe comes from @ChuckWendig: “Future of storytelling: multimedia, illustrated stories, co-created in real time by author, audience, and fictional characters.”
• The Whitehouse got kudos for video storytelling (with music): “Inside the White House: Letters to the President”

• And in a final piece of Twitter-worthiness, author Dave Eggers’ project, Once Upon a School is all about telling “stories about how all kinds of people — from celebrities to retired journalist — are doing their part to improve their local schools.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.