I Am User Generated

In an oral culture the tradition of verbal jousting remains still to this day where an orator verbally challenges his audience sometimes in an intellectual debate or simply in vilifying ones mother. This language of combat is again evidenced in most forums and chat rooms, so much so, that moderators are often put in place to monitor the litany of barbed insults. Even in a relatively tame forum such as a computer repair forum, users often call out other users lack of knowledge on the particular topic. Often the original question is lost to the combat of users. Visit a Sci-Fi forum where the users are experienced chat room users and the forked tongues are everywhere. This is seen less in print and electronic storytelling because the audience is unknown and there is no immediate response. Insulting someone’s mother in a novel loses it’s impact when the novel takes years to write, years to be release and months to read. This should not be seen as childish immature behavior but rather a return to antiquity. So get out there and craft a yo momma diss to the next forum user who rubs you the wrong way in support of the return to orality.

This interaction of orator and audience that is essential to oral storytelling is again resurfacing in the participatory nature of social media. The ability to chat online through forums and message boards was one of the founding functionalities of the Internet long before Web 2.0 was coined, but this was reserved for serious computer users and early adopters. It has not been until recently that the net of social participatory engagement has widened. This is best seen on customer review sites. Brand are used to telling their story or their product messaging through print ads, radio spots, television commercials and website homepages, but as more communities grow online the trust is put into the audience or consumer not the orator or brand. In this case the story has to change and adapt to audience participation. However, this new form of audience participation in brand storytelling has not been without its learning curve. Chevrolet introduced a viral campaign effort that asked consumers to insert their own slogan for the next Chevy Tahoe campaign. Copy that read, “our planet’s oil is almost gone, you don’t need GPS to see where this road leads,” and “like this snowy wilderness? Better get your fill of it now, then say hello to global warming,” was not Chevy’s ideal brand story but it did give them an insight into how consumers saw their brand.

Brands now have to been empathetic and participatory with their consumers, gone are the days of being objectively distant and telling consumers what they want. The whole nature of social based media is an interactive participatory conversation, a sharp departure for traditional media storytellers.

The redundant and copious nature of social media stories is obvious even to the most casual social media audience. In an oral tradition stories would have to be repeated in order to reinforce what was just said. There was not the opportunity to flip back a few pages or rewind to regain the thread of a story. Orators would reiterate and reinforce to help their audience to follow the story. Again even with all the powers of the Internet and computers to archive we still have a huge amount of redundancy in our storytelling. YouTube, the most popular of social media video sharing sites, has a copious amount of stories. One of the main keys to YouTube’s success is that next to the current video story that the audience is watching, the audience has a selection of related videos. These related videos add to the redundancy of the story, which adds to ability to remember, which adds to the ability to keep the story alive. In the YouTube world stories are kept alive by posting video responses. This adds again a redundant step but also adds to the interlocution of storytelling that was lost in mono-directional media such as the novel or radio or all high-definition hot media as McLuhan would so label them.

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.