Through Death & Rebirth

Stories now are open-ended, branching, hyperlinked, cross-media, participatory, exploratory, and unpredictable.

Alexander & Levine, 2008

Our stories continue to be told through many channels with one of the most popularly accessible modes being Wikipedia, which according to Rozenweig is “somewhat in the style of the 1960’s participatory democracy.” (cited by Dobson and Willinsky, 2011 p.20). Each of the stories introduced here are continuing in a multimodal approach to story telling of which Wikipedia is but one component.

The Hunter

The emphasis on oral traditions continues with the creation of a talking dictionary and a history of their language entered into the Ethnologue Languages of the World. and a website for collecting and sharing recorded songs. Members of the Mi’kmaq nation have even published vignets on the National Film Board of Canada site and have joined the Twitterverse with a tweeted word of the day.

The Explorer

As this story continues, history is rewritten. Although evidence has been published recognizing that the Vikings discovered North America some 500 years before Columbus, it wasn’t until 2011 that the President of the United States proclaimed October, 9, 2011, as Leif Erikson Day. Professional documentaries are publically accessible through the National Film Board of Canada website. YouTube has become a favored place for the communal story to be played out and as a way for culture and heritage to be retained and shared.

The Victim

The Rebecca Nurse story continues with the official stories in the Witchcraft Archives which include original documents from the trials, but also through social media where we also see the introduction of commercialism, by way of social enterprise, into her story.

 

 

The Assassinated

The Kennedy story continues today in the form of library archives, news agencies collections and revisiting of the story over the years. A recent event, the finding of the 1963 Airforce One tape, is just the latest in the on-going saga of Kennedy’s death.

Now, the public can and are contributing to the ongoing story through Wikis, and a range of social media with blogs being prolific with various conspiracy theories.

 

The Innovator

Jobs story continues to collaboratively unfold online demonstrating, “… a scenario wherein activities once reserved for professional publishers and writers (e.g. journalists, essayists, columnists, critics, pundits, and so on) are taken up by the public en masse.” (Dobson and Willinsky, 2011, p.20).