I Am User Generated

In direct relation to Ong’s redundant characteristic comes his classification of the oral tradition being conservative or traditionalist. The word conservative or traditional has not normally been associated with emerging social media, but Ong uses these words in a slightly different way than their normal associated meaning. In an oral tradition once the story was uttered it was only archived by memory. This culture put highest value on the “wise old man” that could conserve the stories of his tribe. In order to make it easier to conserve the stories the stories were more traditional and didn’t invite intellectual experimentation. Without the luxury of recording stories, the stories needed to remain simple and easily retold. Although in a social media space we do have the ability to record and archive, the most successful stories are still the ones that are most easily retold. This is the foundation for virality. Stories that are easiest to spread are the most viral. Hence stories tend to be short, reliant on classic tropes without a high degree of intellectual experimentation.Who are the ‘wise old men’ in the social media space? Again it is the person that can aggregate and conserve who are the tribal leaders of the social media space. When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp acquired the social network, Myspace he was able to conserve a multitude of interpersonal, brand and media stories under the heading of his electronic age media company, adding a new participatory element to his media offering.

In an Internet age with mass media saturation reaching epic proportions we as a society are inundated with information. The retention of this massive amount of information is a problem now as it was in an oral tradition. In an oral culture stories had to be remembered in ones own brain, there was not a textual form of archiving. In order to facilitate the memorization of stories, stories were aggregated but not analyzed. Continual analysis would confuse the stories making it more difficult to remember.Aggregation is one of the most notable evolutions of the second generation of the Internet. This aggregation really took off with AJAX technology. Where once a computer-user would wake up in the morning and open a separate url page for a national newspaper, a local newspaper, local weather, local sports team update, an online shop, it is now possible thru Real Simple Syndication (RSS) to have the exact same information and much more all housed on a single url page. Katherine Hayleswould see this as giving a piece of ourselves over to the computer an example of becoming Post-Human, but even with the endless archiving abilities of the Internet we still rely on the memory function housed in our brain just like our ancestors of the oral tradition. The AJAX RSS aggregation of sites like Netvibes or PopURLS help keep the story straight of information we want to receive and facilitate memory in order for us to tell the story over the water-cooler of last night’s game or the weather forecast. This technology helps our human memory but does not facilitate any analysis of this information. It may aggregate the syndicated feed of disparate stories onto the same webpage, but that is where the connection making ends. Daily stories are constantly being updated to these pages but never analyzed.

This is Ong’s most technical defining characteristic which relies heavily on its juxtaposing to the written word. In the written textual world an additive sentence would contain many conjoining words such as “and.” The example Ong uses is from an early manuscript of the Bible, which was conscribed from a 1610 oral delivery:

“In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. And God said: Be light made. And light was made. And God saw the light that it was good; and he divided the light from the darkness. And he called the light Day, and the darkness Night; and there was evening and morning day.”

This passage would make any contemporary writing teacher shudder with its excessive reliance on the word ‘and’, not to mention its lack of poetry. However Joel Sherzerin Exploration in the Ethnography of Speaking points out that in an oral tradition the orator was most concerned with convenience of the delivery of the oration. In our literate culture this is sharply contrasted with Talmy Givon’s analysis of textual semantics, which favors organization and linguistic structure as evidenced by the same Biblical passage from the New American Bible’s translation from 1970.

“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. God saw how good the light was. God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night’. Thus evening came, and morning followed – the first day.”

Comparing early editions of the Bible to micro-blogging and mashups might initially seem a stretch, however in this context of additive oration there are many similarities.Micro-blogging is an evolution of a blog or weblog that is usually confined to under 140 characters of textual writing making it easy to update and receive on a mobile device through short messaging service (SMS). The writing is often in answer to a question such as “what are you doing?” as is the case of one of the most popular micro-blog platforms Twitter. Updates to the micro blog are archived in additive fashion with no reverence for any linguistic structure. This is an example of a twitter story that I follow that a co-worker of mine publishes. It is his life story syndicated publicly, and time stamped sequentially. It is simply his daily life story; entertaining, educational, and an opportunity for building community through interlocution. Unlike most textual and electronic stories it has no clear, beginning, middle or end. There is no prescribed character arc, act structure or organizational hierarchy. It is simple additive pieces of information followed, by another, followed by another, which is also a trait of the mash-up.

The mashup although being nothing new, having being born out of collage, and appropriation works is an example of a genre of storytelling made possible by an emerging social media language. With social integration into the Internet came the sharing of media across community lines. Communities of people would come together and share common interests. Myspace for example is a social network that was created to bring communities together around the commonality of a musical act. This assembly of like-minded music aficionados helped facilitate the musical iteration of the mash-up. DJs, music produces or anyone with consumer audio software could take shared audio files and digitally ‘mash’ them together to create their own song or their own story in a social media language. Most notably, DJ Diplo who champions bands from around the world by mashing-up their music. M.I.A a London MC, a Tamil of Jaffna origin, was Diplo’s first find along with the Brazilian band Bonde Do Role. His mashing up in an addititive fashion of their music did not follow the more literal forms of pop-music production although their music thanks to Diplo’s story offering has shot MIA and Bondo Role to musical fame. Diplo often mashs Baile Funk a niche genre from the favelas of Brazil with contemporary classics helping to solidify older music in our societal memory while also injecting new elements to his musical story.

In legendary DJ Pete Tong’s the BBC Essential Mix he calls Diplo the “cut and paste King,” a title which arguably could be shared with Girl Talk another mash-up artist. In keeping with the oral tradition Girl Talk can be seen as a contemporary rhapsode as he “sews” together songs in an improvised fashion much like a rhasode would weave together myths, poems, and jokes depending on the audience. Although DJing or live musically improvisation is not inherent to the social media landscape it is the social integration into the internet that allows for the stories of music to be more easily shared across musical tribal lines so that the Rhapsode, DJ, or Mash-Up artist can tell a new tale using the additive oral tradition of language.

WHAT

Let’s look for a moment and only a brief moment at the “what” of social media storytelling. What stories are being told within this space? This only warrants a passing glance because ultimately the “what” of storytelling has not changed in centuries. In Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces he outlines the classic mythic forms of storytelling that all stories can be reduced down to. Campbell, whose writings have influenced the greatest modern media story telling, from George Lucas to Stanley Kubrick, charts centuries of literature, film, and poetry and draws parallels between the “what” of every story told from the Christ story, to Buddha, to Osiris, to Promethus to Luke Skywalker. Aristotle’s Poetics from 335 BC explained poetry in a similar way by outlining “first principles” which established storytelling into genres of Tragedy, Comedy and Epic verse. The genres of Aristotle and the myth tales of Campbell have not changed but the mediums have. Through the ages we’ve told the same stories but just in different ways. That being said the medium is not 100% the message as is so often understood from Marshall McLuhan’s pop-culture utterance. Rather, as McLuhan explains in his seminal Playboy interview, that the message is subordinate to medium and that medium has a great influence on the audiences read of the message. For these reasons the emerging language of social media that’s been born by the medium in which social media stories are told will be the focus of this work.

HOW

Historically stories have been told across many different mediums, which have evolved through technological advancement. From the oral tradition of storytelling came the written manuscript. With the advent of the Gutenberg Press these manuscripts could be mass-produced and disseminated to the people. This gave rise to a print and text based culture which McLuhan applies the moniker of the Gutenberg Man to in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Gutenberg Man then started receiving stories through electronic media. This, of course, would be radio, telephones, film and television. The Internet is also in this category of electronic media, but should be separated into Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is seen as an evolution from the initial days of the Internet in that it involves a higher degree of social interaction, participation and collaboration. For the purposes of this paper, the stories that are told within this Web 2.0 space will be referred to as social media stories.Social media is of particular interest not because it is the next evolution of the Internet, but rather because it is more akin to an oral tradition, the birthplace of storytelling. As earlier stated social media is characterized by interaction, participation and collaboration, which is only the beginning of the similarities of oral and social media storytelling. In the following pages these similarities will be further explored against the backdrop of Reverend Walter J. Ong’s definitions of orality with examples from social media stories to support the connection. It is up to us as the individual to wield this power appropriately.In analyzing social media storytelling it is important to compare it against other mediums that have supported storytelling in the past in order to understand its workings and to see if it’s even worth all the press and hype it’s getting. Is Web 2.0 really changing; the media landscape, changing the rules of business and forever altering our culture? Although there is a limited amount of academic research into the emerging field of social media there is much study at the highest level on transitional periods when new forms of technology have changed the way we tell stories. Again if a culture is understood by the stories they tell then it is stories that should be analyzed. Although social media storytelling directly proceeds and has been birthed by a confluence of a technology age with an Internet/computer electronic age these posts will present a case that it owes more in the language of storytelling to an oral tradition. Admittedly, social media stories are told using electronic age and computer age tools such as video, broadband, and html coding, however it is not the interest of this site to compare the tools of storytelling, but rather the form, style, and textual and visual language of the stories being told. The tools are not off interest simply because of cross-platforming. This Web 2.0 buzzword means of course the ability of the story to function across many delivery platforms such as a mobile device (iPod, cellular phone), a blog, a video sharing site (YouTube), an online store (ebay, iTunes), and an online social network (Facebook, Linkedin). To reiterate, the tools are ubiquitous and the message or what of the stories has been the same throughout changes in tools and medium. Over the next few weeks I’ll now turn to the how social media stories are told in a similar language to that of an oral tradition of storytelling.

Try and go a day without talking about Facebook, or referencing a YouTube video or somehow interacting with a piece of social media. It’s a Herculean task at times that even the most ardent Ludditte can’t avoid. How we sit around the fire and tell our stories has forever been altered by the social media landscape. But what stories are being told and how are they being told? Is social integration into the Internet, often referred to as Web 2.0, even worth all the talk that it garners? With the overwhelming dearth of media that is springing forth every second it’s easy to discount it all as pure media noise with no inherent value. However, if we understand a culture by the stories they tell, then we can’t discount the boom of content that the growing number of social media platforms enables.Over the past while I’ve been starting to see connections between how a oral culture told their stories and how social media stories are being told. In the following weeks I will dedicate some posts to exploring this connection further