Web 2.0 Storytelling

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Description

Bryan Alexander:

"A story has a beginning, a middle, and a cleanly wrapped-up ending. Whether told around a campfire, read from a book,or played on a DVD, a story goes from point A to B and then C. It follows a trajectory, a Freytag Pyramid—perhaps the line of a human life or the stages of the hero's journey. A story is told by one person or by a creative team to an audience that is usually quiet, even receptive. Or at least that’s what a story used to be, and that’s how a story used to be told.Today, with digital networks and social media, this pattern is changing. Stories now are open-ended, branching, hyperlinked, cross-media, participatory, exploratory, and unpredictable. And they are told in new ways: Web 2.0storytelling picks up these new types of stories and runs with them, accelerating the pace of creation and participation while revealing new directions for narratives to flow.

As the phrase suggests, it is the telling of stories using Web 2.0 tools, technologies, and strategies. Since the name is fairly recent (and not yet widely used), it may not bear out as the best term for this trend. Another name may emerge, one better suited to describing this narrative domain. However, the term seems to have met with quiet acknowledgment to date, so it may serve as a useful one going forward.

We will identify two essential features that are useful indistinguishing Web 2.0 projects and platforms from the rest of the web: microcontent and social media.


The first feature, microcontent, suggests that authors create small chunks of content, with each chunk conveying a primary idea or concept.

These pieces are smaller than websites in terms of information architecture and are meant to be reused in multiple ways and places. They are also often much smaller than websites in terms of the amount of storage that each chunk takes up: blog posts, wiki edits, YouTube comments, and Picasa images are usually only a few thousand bytes. Some types of microcontent, ironically, can be quite large from a storage perspective but areself-contained—namely, audio (podcasts), video (for web platforms, such as YouTube), or embeddable Flash applets.Their uploading to the web is a simple matter for the user and does not require anything in the way of web design expertise. Even creating a website through Web 2.0 tools is a radically different matter compared with the days of HTML hand-coding and of moving files with FTP clients. Creating Web 2.0 content requires only making a few selections from menus, choosing from a variety of well-designed templates, or adding a page name to another, already-established wikipage. One outcome of this authoring approach is a drastically lower bar for participation and publishing. Although some faculty members might hesitate to learn a website editor such as Dreamweaver, an arcane method of FTP, and local campus web directory structures, they can now begin telling the world about Mideast politics or biological processes after spending only five minutes learning how to use Blogger or Wikispaces. The technology thus becomes more transparent; attention is focused on the content. As a result, the amount of rich web media and content has grown in quantity and diversity. And any student of history would not be surprised to observe that out of those manifold ways of writing and showing have emerged new practices for telling stories. A second essential component to Web 2.0 is what we used to refer to as “social software.” Although Web 2.0 tools now generally offer multiple levels of privacy, and therefore host a growing amount of content inaccessible to a broad audience, Web 2.0 platforms are often structured to be organized around people rather than the traditional computer hierarchies of directory trees. Websites designed in the 1990s and later offered few connecting points for individuals, generally speaking, other than perhaps a guestbook or a link to an e-mail address. But Web 2.0 tools are built to combine microcontent from different users with a shared interest: a blog post and a comment; a Delicious page for a URL with many different users having bookmarked the same URL;a group of Flickr photos from different people connected by the common use of a descriptive tag; or multiple authors in a single wiki page. If readers closely examine a Web 2.0 project, they will find that it is often touched by multiple people, whether in the content creation or via associated comments or discussion areas. If they participate actively, by contributing content, we have what many call social media." (http://www.academia.edu/2167155/Web_2.0_storytelling_Emergence_of_a_new_genre)