Storytelling, or at least the wikipedia essence of it. You've got a little bit of your history... some oral traditions... some aesthetics to follow. But you know what? I really just don't find wikipedia's definition interesting. It doesn't work for me.
Kind of just like how I found lonelygirl15 to be uninteresting. I blame it on her acting, maybe the "fractured narrative", or maybe it was just the fact that her boobs distracted me every time my eyes glanced at the screen.
Kind of just like how I found "What should I do with my life" to be uninteresting. I blame that on the monotone stranger speaking into the microphone for the voiceover, maybe the, again, "fractured narrative", or maybe it was just the fact that I was asking myself, "what should I do with my life?" if I seriously had sat through the whole thing.
Anyway, I happened to be at my friend's apartment and she happens to be a creative writing major. Nifty eh? She pointed out this website. Very cool by the way. So I picked this video that I would like to share...
First of all, Go Milwaukee! Second of all, I didn't think twice about trying to dig for another story. I didn't even know what the story was about before I thought, "I like this. This is going to be my topic."
"I masturbate, I masturbate, and I masturbate"
I truly enjoyed this story because, one, it was narrated by multiple people, two, its about something that is relative to my age group, three, it was funny, four, it was an obvious narrative (I seem to have figured out I like those better).
And I realized at some point, this is the longest conversation I've ever had with a woman that's not my mother.
And people might think, "it's only three minutes long, what's the value in that". But I think in and of itself there is a colossal amount of value. Yes, this is personal opinion, but seriously I just got done with the hardest day of my finals, in serious need of some whiskey and nicotine; but this made me laugh, it made me interested in actually writing this post which I didn't think my brain had the capacity to do tonight, and I find a tremendous amount of value in that.
This is it, I'm going to be having sex, I'm getting laid
Going back to web 2.0 storytelling and traditional storytelling, I've found another plus for the web. You can sit down in front of your computer, pull up some short storytelling clips of something you're in to, and laugh... or cry... or whatever mood you feel like being in. I'm not the person who has a stack of books with short stories, so the web is a much better place for me to go.
Fake it till you make it
On top of that, you get the hand motions in the video. Yes, I can read a short story and somewhere in my deep down imagination station, create the character the story is describing, but it's not the same. With this particular tab in digital storytelling, you get these emotions pushed on to you, you don't have to think, "well hey there's this dorky college kid, okay, and he's never been laid, okay, so he may look like this, okay, and he's facing this stern faced woman, okay" etc. It's already there for you. You're getting someone's, or multiple in this case, interpretation of the story, not just your own. And especially in this case, the interpretation of many people which I think is catchy and interesting.
This one was great; clearly, though, lots of expertise and money behind it. I'm pretty sure that changes its impact.
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