By SCOTT ROSENBERG
This is the fourth year I've come here to Crested Butte, Colorado in the fall for the Digital Storytelling Festival. Every year a group of writers, artists, actors, designers, Web developers and technogeeks gathers from around the globe in this tiny mountain town. Getting here isn't easy -- if you make it to Denver on time, you climb into a puddle-jumper, a little propeller plane that hops you over the front range of the Rockies to the nearest decent sized city, Gunnison. Frum Gunnison you take a bus that climbs through aspen-covered hillsides to Crested Butte. Here, you're 9000 feet above sea level -- an altitude that can dehydrate you and also leave you a little giddy.
There are a lot of people here, like me, from the San Francisco Bay Area. Also people from the east coast, and from Australia, from England. Why do we all come so far?
One reason the Digital Storytelling Festival is here in Crested Butte is that its founder, Dana Atchley, has lived here on and off for decades. (This year's festival's live radio show is being broadcast from his newly refurbished barn.) There's also an intimate, well-equipped town arts center that serves as the festival's hub. There's lots of good restaurants, and unmatchable mountain scenery. But is this a sensible place to be sitting around and talking about the future of media, or how computers are changing our culture?
Well, on the most obvious level there's an advantage to being cut off or distanced a bit from the beeping, sleepless network of email and cell phones that envelops most of our lives. It should be a little easier to think here. The pace is different. The speed limit in Crested Butte is 15 miles per hour -- and they're serious about enforcing it.
When you're pondering the nature of stories and the way cultures transmit them, it's also useful to be in a place that's got its own trove of history and tales and traditions. Crested Butte started as a mining town, became something of a counterculture haven in the '60s, and more recently it became a skiing center. There are a lot of stories in a place like this. We're very far from suburbia and mall land, the places in our landscape where history seems to have disappeared.
It's hard to believe, but this Digital Storytelling Festival now has its own history as well. It began three years ago as an intimate gathering of maybe 30 or so people all of whom were asking different versions of the same questions: As we come to rely on computers to shape our work, our entertainment and the personal expressions we care most about, what changes and what stays the same? Where do stories come from, anyway? Why do some survive and others disappear?
We're still asking those questions today, but a lot has happened in those three years. The biggest change has been the rise of the Web. We knew three years ago that computers had become amazing tools for helping people tell personal stories in new ways -- mixing text and voice and music and still images and video into a hybrid that received the awkward label of digital multimedia. Back then the big problem was distribution. People could make new kinds of stories -- but how would they get them to other people?
As if by magic, the answer quickly materialized: the Internet's supersonic growth provided a means for people to communicate their stories. Personal Web sites, net communities, bulletin boards and newsgroups all provided new avenues for the ancient storytelling art.
So here we are again. Today the Digital Storytelling Festival is a remarkably eclectic event where people learn how to make personal movies, tell stories on the Web, show off new work -- and argue late into the night about whether all of this is a good thing or a bad thing.
Scott Rosenberg is senior editor at Salon Magazine.