I Am User Generated

As Walter J. Ong tells us in his book Orality and Literacy,”oral societies live very much in the present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance.” This is as true now as it was in an oral tradition. The format of blogging is set up to push stories down the webpage visually as new stories are published. These stories are archived but in a visual hierarchy they are seen as lesser to more recent posts. As aggregator sites collect stories they often automatically refresh and cull in more recent stories thus “sloughing off” the older stories. The algorithim of Digg.com, one of the more popular story aggregators is such that stories that are ‘digged’ by readers or in other words rated highly are shown more on the landing page, but the time of publication is also factored in to show highest rated and most recent. There are social booking sites such as del.icio.us that serve as online tools for bookmarking or remembering stories however the greatest value of these sites is for sharing of stories that are important to the individual. For example, del.icio.us/radarddb tells my audience stories that are important to me at my workplace, but always displayed in chronological order with the visual hierarchy being that of most recent at the top. In a social media landscape that perpetuates new stories being published every second, stories that are not memorable are in the past and likely to be forgotten.

Walter Ong separates these into two separate points, however as they relate to social media in the same way I’ll group them together. In an oral tradition the audience is known and the audience is human. It is humans in dialogue with other humans in a live physical space. This is very different from the unknown audience of a book or the abstract world that many films present. Social media abides by the same principles of human-to-human interaction, albeit through technological mediation. This is a main reason that Second Life will only be seen as a blip on the Web 2.0 radar in years to come. Humans are being asked to relate to each in an interface that is a mere simulation of a lifeworld, with the abstraction of avatars. Second Life will remain for an elite crowd of computer users who feel most comfortable interacting in an abstraction of reality. This does not hold true for the majority of broadband users.

That being said the gaming industry has been saved by the advent of Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). MMORPGs took the convention of gaming, which was not of a real lifeworld and was situationality abstract and infused a human element by allowing users to play and communicate with each other worldwide over a broadband connection. Users started to create new forms of storytelling in a social media language over these broadband connections. Machinima, one such emergent form of storytelling, was born out of a filmic electronic age but operates in the language of social media storytelling. Over the broadband connection users control video game characters to act out small short films. These films are recorded to a hard drive from which the footage is edited, scored and ultimately produced in a similar tradition to digital filmmaking. The most popular of these films is the series Red vs. Blue where the soldiers of Halo, controlled and voiced by a group of gamers, simply pontificate on life, a departure from the narrative of the original video game which included the abstract narrative of saving the world from alien invasion.

Another example of apply to new concreteness to un-situational and abstract form of storytelling is Alternate Reality Games or ARGs. One such example is the promotional ARG for the film The Bourne Supremacy where contestants are given clues online to the physical location in their home city to more clue in order to solve part of the mystery that takes place in the film. Another example of cross-platforming, but also a clear indication of infusing a situational element to an otherwise abstract story of a super agent trained to kill by an unknown government body.

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.

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.

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