A young girl crawled into a warm bed one cold night, and called to her father that it was story time

The father sat down beside his daughter’s bed and began “a long time ago, even before you were born, there was a young boy who lived with his mother.  When the boy was first born, he was placed on his mother’s chest and she told him a story before they fell asleep together.  Each night after that, the mother told her son a story before he fell asleep, each night a new story.  One night she told her son a story about his father, another night about his sister.  One night she told him a story about rabbits and how they hop, another night about chickens and the eggs they lay.  One night she told him a story about bravery, another night about cowardice.

“Sometimes the mother and son traveled great distances to tell the story, and sometimes they went to a neighbour’s house.  Sometimes they stayed in the son’s room, his mother telling a story from his bedside.  For the story about rabbits and how they hop, the mother and son went to the woods behind their house.  For the story about his father, they traveled to a far away place.

“One night, the young boy asked his mother to tell him a different story, one that was unlike anything she had ever told him, unlike anything he had ever heard.  The mother smiled at her son’s request, almost sadly, like a wince or a grimace.  She asked if he was sure, that he wanted to hear something very different.  Her son nodded his head, and the mother smiled wider, knowingly.

“The mother inched closer to her son’s bed, and whispered in his ear.  She whispered a story of evil people, in evil times, doing evil things to evil people.  When the mother had finished her story, she leaned back in her chair and looked at her son.  He was thinking about the story, running it through his mind.  Finally he said ‘mother, I don’t really like that story.  Can you take it back and tell me another one?’

“His mother kissed his forehead, and walked across the bedroom.  ‘I’m sorry my dear,’ his mother said, pausing at the door, ‘I can’t take the story back.  It’s your’s now.  To forget or remember, to retell or to change.  To find your place within it’”

The father asked his daughter if she liked the story.  His daughter said she didn’t.  He smiled and said he would tell her another story the next night.

—

I told this story to my partner, after having sketched the story in my head and the writing it down quickly, so I could at least have something to refer to if I forgot a whole part.  I found it went really quickly quicker than I thought it would.  I also kept wanting to stop and change things, to be able to pour over it and rework sentences.

I’ve gotten used to ‘showing, not telling’.  But that was really difficult here.  I had planned to go into detail about the chair the mother sits in beside the bed, but I found I couldn’t do that as easily and remember everything.  I got to thinking that this might be easier with a kind of crowd-sourcing of the details, over time.  If this story, or any story was told and retold over and over, people could add-in details, and some would stick and some wouldn’t.  And as a teller got more comfortable telling it, they could add in a detail, that someone else would get comfortable with, and then add on to it.

I think a story that has a shell but relies on others to populate it lends itself to an oral tradition.  You’ve got your structure, but then each person can add in details that make it meaningful to their lives.  The earlier stories could be changed from rabbits and chickens to moose and wolves, and they could be expanded, if the teller wants to actually tell that story (another story within the story).  I’m thinking of something like the famous joke that comedians tell among themselves (The Aristocrats – I won’t link to it, because it’s definitely ‘not safe for work/school’…and Bob Sagat’s version might not even be ‘safe for life’).  But I think leaving out the details of the ‘evil story’ is a great idea, not least because it reminds me of this gem (particularly around 3:01).

Roland Barthes wrote that “the the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author” (Barthes, last sentence). If I understand this correctly (and I can’t claim to be an expert on post-structuralism!), this was a response to the prevailing authoritarianism of the author in interpreting text. While literature represents permanence in that the text does not change, once something is written it belongs at any given moment to that reader, given meaning and interpretation by that reader.

But with story, we might say that the birth of a listener is a resurrection of the storyteller. And digital media has played no small role in this resurrection.

Digital media, in particular social media and other methods of publishing – or publicizing – has lead to a democratization of of storytelling, both in terms of product and process. Traditional publishing options in print require significant expense (printing, marketing, etc.). Digital publishing is significantly less cost-prohibitive, enabling anyone with access to a computer and internet connection to place their story in the public realm for others to consume. This change in the economics of publishing also dismantles many (though not all) of the power structures of traditional printing. Someone with a story to tell no longer has to convince others to produce their product. Of course, they may have to convince other to consume their product, something further aided by digital media, where consumers become publishers – linking to a digital story, writing reviews, and publicizing the story within their social media networks.

This democratization enables the liberation of both storyteller and consumer. The storyteller is given agency, again both in terms of product and process. Having (a more) equal opportunity to tell their story (a product of their efforts) makes the teller an agent of their truth, but only having a product – for example, telling someone else’s story for them – “does not address the process of that person’s own liberation” (Lambert 117). “Individuals need to be supported in telling their own story; in their own way, to the audiences they choose” (117). Digital media, with the freedom to produce, and produce in any way, is one of these ‘supports’. This in turn can (under the right circumstances) hasten the liberation of the listener from their ‘one truth’, upsetting Us, forcing Us to confront the reality of another fact or truth – and, importantly for social media with its immediate and simultaneous networks, many other facts and truths, or more accurately, many other stories (Chamberlain 222).

But it is important to note that the very media that enables this liberation can also frustrate it. In traditional publishing, the author cannot control who views their product. Social media privacy settings, for example, allow storytellers to much more narrowly select their audience. On the other side of this interaction, restricting our own social media networks, and the more pervasive filter bubbles, can limit that confrontation of other truths that stories force upon us.

Outside of the democratizing and liberating effects of new modes of publishing, digital media enables story, even when it is written down, to retain the impermanence of orality by mimicking the interaction of storytelling. This is achieved through overt and subtle interaction. We see interaction in digital stories that invite comments and that include discussion boards, permitting dialogue between teller and listener, and between listeners – ultimately blurring the line between who is telling and who is listening at any given moment. In this sense, the text is not really final, it is continually reimagined and rewritten as long as that interaction is is enabled. We also see this overt interaction in multimedia stories, such as the stories of Pine Point that combines text, visuals, audio and a listener-directed experience (where the listener is free to digest the story in a non-linear way if they choose).

This interaction that gives digital stories characteristics of oral storytelling can also be very subtle, as in the case of hypertext (text that lies outside the current text, but which is accessible through that current text; though we may more accurately call these hyper-representations, since this can include visuals and audio). Hypertext, accessed through hyperlinks, enable the listener to affect the story by choosing not only when or how to view that text (or other media), but whether to view it.

Of course, this interaction has occurred ion other media – for example, in 18^th and 19^th century pamphleteering and salons, with multimedia (visuals, text), protracted discussions between authors and between authors and audiences, and source citations. But perhaps we can point to a few important differences, in addition to the democratizing and in turn liberating elements of digital storytelling. Storytelling in the digital age is more immediate, is more simultaneous, and reaches far more people, resulting in incredible economies of scale when it comes to ‘fact finding’, for example (which is to say, when it comes to storytelling).

I think this a question that will come out during the course and in our final project – how significant is the difference between digital storytelling and the older modes of storytelling that also included similar elements of interaction – is it in the numbers, the immediacy, etc.?

Works Cited:

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Aspen (1967): n. pag. Web. 18 Jan 2014.

Lambert, Joe. Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. New York: Routledge, 2013. Web. 18 Jan 2014.

Chamberlain, Edward J. If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.

“Eli Pariser: Beware online ‘filter bubbles’.” May 2011. Ted. Web. 18 Jan 2014.

Shoebridge, Paul. and Michael Simons. “Welcome to Pine Point.” National Film Board of Canada. n.d. Web. 18 Jan 2014.

“Tom Standage: Writing on the Wall.” 05 Jan 2014. CBC. Web. 18 Jan 2014.