Digital Storytelling Revisited: Review article Simon Heywood

storylines volume V issue 3 Joe Lambert: Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community

Carolyn Handler Miller: Digital Storytelling: A Creative Guide to Interactive Entertainment

Digital storytelling in its most basic form is what it sounds like: telling stories using digital media. If that sounds like just uploading films from your phone, then that’s because, well, basically, that’s what it is ... and if you’re already wondering why that might require a textbook - or a threeday workshop - or a university department - then you’re beginning to appreciate the challenges facing the authors of these books, especially since both are new editions of textbooks originally published a dozen years ago. There are at least three obstacles to any claim to authority on online culture. Firstly, it changes too fast. Secondly, it really is a grassroots, vernacular phenomenon. Any would-be teacher needs to have something to teach that people cannot figure out for

Simon Heywood Digital Storytelling Revisited

Review article

storylines volume V issue 3 themselves: a quick browse through Youtube suggests that people are already pretty good at figuring things out for themselves. Online humanity, seemingly, needs no teacher. Or does it? Paradoxically, the web is also the opposite of the grassroots. The most-viewed videos on Youtube are all music releases by mass-market artists who would probably be famous if the internet had never been invented. Digital storytelling might find a niche in this conservative, commercial world, as a mutant form of advertising, but it’s a moot point whether humanity really needs more advertising. Veteran activist Joe Lambert stakes a claim to be a digital storyteller of the kind who teaches people and communities how to use the web to liberate or empower themselves, mainly by making and sharing short films narrating their own experience, in a facilitated workshop environment. The best of his book is the interviews and conversations with people who collaborated on his projects: here there is a real and exciting sense of engagement and the possibility of change. Carolyn Handler Miller’s book claims to teach readers how to be a digital storyteller of the more conservative, commercial kind. She blandly advises us that digital storytelling involves advertising which is not too obvious about the fact that it’s advertising, and which gives the viewer the illusion of a control they don’t actually have - and she makes that sound wholesome and professional as well, which is certainly quite an achievement. Part of Joe Lambert’s book tells the story of how his collaborators ended up drawn into marketing projects for huge corporations, and a6er reading Miller’s book I can sort of see how that happened. What are we, as storytellers, to make of these books? They’re great on the digital; are they great on the storytelling? Miller has some really interesting things to say about the narrative structure of games. But generally, and strangely, both books insist on the primal need for a good story, but neither seems in any haste to define what a good story is, or what makes stories good, and neither contains much specific guidance on how the reader can

storylines volume V issue 3 get better at coming up with good stories. Relatedly, when they do describe oral tradition, they tend to do so in suspiciously simplistic terms of ancient campfires, story-circles, and one-size-fits-all monomyths of the sort which probably never existed until Joseph Campbell decided they did. Miller, for example, clearly thinks that the interactive nature of digital storytelling is a wholly new thing. And clearly it isn’t. Shrewd listeners in oral cultures have always made their mark on their storytelling: heckling, interruption, turntaking and disputation; boredom and inattention; rapt silence, laughter, tears - these things are the lifeblood of many oral traditions, and, even today, live storytellers don’t get far today before beginning to encounter them the hard way. That’s exactly how a traditional story, over time, becomes the legacy of a whole community as well as the work of a series of gi6ed individual artists. Sweeping all this aside with a passing nod to Campbell, Miller blandly assures us that oral and prehistoric storytelling must have been “[a]t best ... an extremely weak form of interactivity.” Why must it? Because it wasn’t done with computers? Yeah, right. For all that, it would be unfair to dismiss these books out of hand. Each is a goldmine of useful ideas and information on its own subjects - the technology and its social and commercial applications - and I can see myself returning to both for those reasons. Besides game structure, Miller is fascinating on augmented and alternative realities, and convergent media. But specifically as accounts of story and storytelling, it can be frustrating to see such incomplete and o6en misplaced perspectives offered as the expertise of leaders in the field.

Joe Lambert, Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. 4th edition (paperback). Routledge / Center for Digital Storytelling, 2013 (2002) ISBN 978041562703-0, £23.99 Carolyn Handler Miller, Digital Storytelling: A Creative Guide to Interactive Entertainment. 3rd edition (paperback). Focal Press, 2014 (2004) ISBN 978041583694-4,$44.95