As long as there has been a Digital Storytelling Festival -- and the event is now in its third year here in Crested Butte, Colorado -- people have been arguing over what makes a story "digital," and what makes a story a story.
That debate will not and should not end. These questions remain vital, but they are no longer novel. It would be a shame if we kept returning to square one each year.
And so before plunging into the issues that animated this year's festival I want to offer a quick recap of festivals past.
Here are some questions that may help us figure out whether [digital] experiments can share the label "story" -- and whether they can fill the important place stories hold in our culture: Do they have characters with whom we identify? Beginnings, middles, and ends? Personalities? Playfulness, or beauty, or recognizable truth? Do they tell us about other people's lives? Do we remember them? Do they change us?If the answers are all "no," then whatever it is, it's probably not a story. And if many of the answers are "yes," then we should hardly care whether we call it digital.
The marathon panel talk Saturday morning here at Crested Butte exposed a rift in attitude as unavoidable as the nearby Continental Divide.On one side: artists who view interactive stortelling as an opportunity to create works of art that find completion in the mind of the audience.
On the other: artists who doubt that interactivity and storytelling can coexist at the level of art.
Chris Crawford raised what remains the fundamental question about using computers to tell stories: "Are we just doing the same old shit with a computer, only faster and cheaper?" ...Crawford went on: "The only thing the computer brings to the party that is different is interactivity. But we don't have a very clear idea of what interactivity is; we are like people in 1908 discussing what is 'cinematic.'" ...
Is interactivity a function of what happens between a reader or "user" and a digital artwork? Or is digital technology more valuable as a tool to connect artist and audience -- or transform the audience into the artist's collaborators?
This year's festival began with Dave Winer's effort to elicit an answer to the ostensibly simple question, "Who are we?" But it didn't take long before we were trying to define what a story is. Janet Murray suggested a quotation from E.M. Forster, in which the novelist argues that "the queen died and then the king died" is a chronicle, whereas "the queen died and then the king died of grief" is a story. Winer pointed out that this was an example but not a definition; he proposed that "a story reaches inside of you -- it's satisfying -- it feels good."
Joe Lambert, in the course of describing his and Nina Mullen's work leading digital storytelling workshops at the San Francisco Digital Media Center and around the world, came in on a different angle: "What we're talking about is a system of values about the importance of memory -- an intergenerational dialogue about storytelling and remembrance. We're trying to inculcate the importance of taking the time to tell the story of yourself or the people you love."
Thursday morning's presentations offered a range of different examples and perspectives: Nina and Joe showed a sampling of digital-film shorts from their workshops, in which their students -- many of whom arrived with little or no digital expertise -- produced five-minute Quicktime movies based on personal narratives (like one filmmaker's chronicle of an encounter with the ghost of her great-grandfather in an old New England house that her brother was renovating). Susan Abdulezer described her resourceful work using multimedia technology in the special education program of New York City's public schools and showcased some of the special tools she's developed -- like a "Learn the ABCs" program geared to a half-dozen different kinds of learning, including braille, sign language, lip reading and more. Janet Murray moved the discussion from practice to theory, providing a precis of some of the principles outlined in her book, "Hamlet on the Holodeck."
Here are some of the flashpoint issues that emerged from audience questions -- and that the rest of this festival, and my remaining articles here, will explore:
Scott Rosenberg is senior editor at Salon. You can email him at scottros@well.com.