Why This Matters - Dawson Nichols

There are so many reasons, but here is an example with which I am currently working.

Hansen Hosein, the UW’s new media guru, is starting a “Storytelling Uprising,” proudly proclaiming that he “gets lost exploring the future of communication through storytelling and digital media.”

http://www.facebook.com/StorytellerUprising

It’s a great example of how stream-of-consciousness is the mode of communication of the day. It has infected all forms of communication from journalism to personal journaling to social conversation. These days there is no need to organize thought – certainly no need to organize it in different ways for different purposes. If the Director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the UW is happily getting lost in his own communications and regurgitating ideas haphazardly, why shouldn’t we.

Well, we do. And it feels good. And everyone’s doing it, so it feels safe too. Never mind that it’s luring us all into mediating our lives and distancing us from one another. Look at the Twitter ad Hosein extols in the above Facebook blog (Sept. 14 post).

I find this ad distressing in so many ways, but here are a couple of examples:

First, the underlying message of the ad is that an experience is validated by being cataloged or reported through Twitter. The ad is based on a romance, the idea being that Twitter can help with this real-world activity. But the people literally have no faces until they are online. In the real world they are bodies only, and it is not until they embrace this new media that they have individuality and identity. The culmination of the date is getting it documented online. This is one of the great invidious lures of new media. You are anonymous in the real world, but online you have friends – followers even.

Second, the new medium is sold by appealing to the nostalgia of actual sensual experience. The technologies of the actual date are a vinyl record, a book, a bottle of wine, the moon. But these things are referents only – we don’t hear the record, we get no excerpt from the book, the wine is never even opened, the moon is only useful because it can be photographed and placed in a tweet to show that romance was possible. This is the sort of short-handing that has become ubiquitous in storytelling today (don’t get me started about current writers’ use of plot points rather than actual plot), and it can diminish actual experience just as it diminishes stories. The experience becomes nothing more than a useful tool to enrich our online presence. The not-even-close-to-clever self-referential embedding of the ad itself (even Land-O-Lakes was way ahead of you, Twitterheads) within the ad toward the end plays this out. The roulette wheel of other tweets fades to black, suggesting that so many other experiences – as gratifying and enriching as the date – are documented online. So… spend more time online avoiding the actual experiences the bodies you saw documented for you.

Does this seem off-topic for a play about journalism in the new media environment? Well, I’ll turn this into a teaser by saying that if you want to see how it relates you’ll have to actually bring your body along with your brain to see the play in a live theater. Have a sensual experience with other people who are engaged in the same activity.

Of course, we encourage you to tweet and blog about it after.