The Last Man on Earth Sat Alone in a Room
Posted by nicole on November 4th, 2009
The best storytelling starts with a sense of mystery to pull you in, but what is NOT a story? This is the opening to the “teaching and storytelling using Web 2.0″ session at Educause. An exercise in the room included comments around something that is not heard, something that lacks personal engagement, something that does not have narrative. This describes a lot of the way we present information.
Of course the web was used for storytelling before web 2.0: Dreaming Methods is a good example of this. So what is the difference now? I think the real difference is a) the ease in which everyone can now communicate online without needing to understand html and b) the ability to respond to stories, which is closer to the older concept of storytelling as a community exercise.
Bringing this back to make it a bit more relevant to this blog, I’m interested in the difference between fictional storytelling and personal storytelling. As we all use web 2.0 tools, how do we build and manage our own storytelling? This is described as character 101 in this session. We have the aibility to create characters online using persona, and to also use our personas to tell non-fictional stories without necessarily revealing our identity. This creates interesting nuances, with people following and befriending fictional characters (such as meerkats from adverts) and personas of real people that are entirely disconnected from the real person behind them.
Important take away from this session for me? what we do in Web 2.0 is no different from what we have always done. We Chat. We Gossip We Relate. We Discuss. We sometimes Work. Is Web 2.0 really all that different from attending a ball at Netherfield?