I Am User Generated

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.

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.

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

Further to my last post, where I raised the issues surrounding the confluence of art, academia and social media storytelling, I’m also faced with the difficulty that most net.art artist face as well.

Art is in the flaws of the art. It is these in between spaces that invite more investigation. Evidence of this is the Grande Odelisque where the female form seems to be elongated with an unnatural leg position. Was this simply a mistake or a comment on the male gaze on woman? Are these flaws or open doors for further investigation. This can been seen throughout the ages in art, but now that we are all getting more used to using software and computer based applications that are based on closed circuits of true and false answers, we have no patience for flaws in art that are hosted on the internet as is the case with net.art.

The leap to make flawed art housed on the Internet is naturally a stretch considering that the whole purpose of the Internet and computer is all about programs working and helping our lives.  I see this as an interesting challenge that invites more exploration. I’ve always like the idea of creating art with a perceived value in which in fact has no use, purpose or value.  It is the exploration of the potential use that seems to stimulate the audiences mind. This stimulation of the mind is getting lost in the Internet and social media space.