Define: Multimedia Storytelling

A friend and myself are having a discussion about various aspects of media studies. The notion of multimedia storytelling is proving to be a bit of a stumbling block for us. I decided that I would email some folks around the lab to ask them to compose a paragraph describing their denotation and connotations of the concept. Well, this is that email. I know it's a strange request, but if you have a moment, it would be really useful.

Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 06:37:43 -0500 (EST)
From: Carson Reynolds 
To: courtney_humphries_at_hms.harvard.edu
Subject: Bran Ferren

This is the guy who I heard speak a few years ago about storytelling. He's
a media researcher at Disney. Here's an article covering a talk he gave on
Storytelling:

http://www0.mercurycenter.com/archives/acm97/stories/ferren0303.htm

-carson-

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 11:11:52 -0400 (EDT)
To: Carson Reynolds 
Subject: Re: define multimedia storytelling


You asked for it. :)  I hope you do not expect coherent writing --
complete with spell checking and reasonable grammer. Ditto for
research. :)

Multimedea storytelling (free association) :

STORY TELLING:
        - Implies a narative :
                - Implies linear time unfolding "events"
                        - Implies "start"
                        - Implies "end"
        - Implies "Teller"
        - Implies "Audiance"

MultiMedia:
        - Means 'more than one medium'
                - Could be Sound + Images
                - Could be Images and Words
                - Could be Sound and Text
                - Could be Movement and Light (etc)

Socialogical overloading of Buzzwords:
        - Multimedia:
                - overloaded to mean "High-Tech"
                - overloaded to mean 'experiemental'
                - associated with 'sound blaster' audio cards

        - Story Telling:
                - overloaded to imply children
                - overloaded WRT "the moral of the story"
                (many times audiances of performances movies, puppet
                shows etc, ask thems selves -- what the story 'means'
                I personally HATE this. You wanted my opinion right?)


Some more comonplaces examples of MutliMedia Story Telling often
overlooked because they do not incorporate enough fog machines,
lasers, or sound blaster cards:

        - Movies
        - Puppet Shows
        - Historical Reenactments
        - Theme Park rides (pirates of the carribean, the Haunted
          mansion, spider man) (Many rides do NOT tell a story some
          do)
        - Radio Dramas
        - Balet (This is broad and some Balets are non-narrative)
        - Opera (See above)
        - Television News
        - Ritualized Worship
        - Plays

I would also make a strong case that ghost stories told around a camp
fire are a multimedia event, because the darkness and solitude of the
environment is critical to the experience.  The camp fire enhances the
telling of the story, to a point where it is almost requesite.


Perhaps the most interesting development in the last 20 years is that
of video games -- however for the most part the narative is usually
secondary to the action.  Occasionally this paradigm is broken by
something like myst.

Other random comments:

        - In concurance with the notion of 'multi-media' society has
          also become more comfortable with 'non-linear' story
          telling, or presentations with no time flow at all. These to
          me seem to be multi-media 'Experiences' -- and I for one
          completely enjoy 'experiencing' phenomena in the absense of
          narative.  I think this recent trend is FAR more imporant
          than the various media that are used to deliver such
          experiences.  Paintings which do not tell a narative, are
          more interesting to me.  Music which does not impose lyrics
          are more interesting to me (though they generally do
          incorporate the linear unfolding of events in time)

        - I think the development of more flexable media has opened up
          more creative possibilities for 'experiences' where as they
          have done little to change the essence of a linear narative
          or story.  We see film makers only just now starting to
          experiment with non-linear time, and only a few film makers
          attempt to make films with no story or narrative at all.
          Ever film I have seen without a narrative I have enjoyed.

        - The whole 5 minutes of fame / life as art / art as life /
          media is the message thing that all the po-mo's were talking
          about is really really really real now, as evidenced by the
          reality shows, the 'bert is evil' bin laden protest posters,
          and the fact that 'americas most wanted' will be cojoining
          the news of the war (the way fantasy island used to link up
          with the love boat) all point to the fact that we live in a
          hyper post modern world as predicted in the 1960's. (I love
          it here personally)

I think that's the point: different communities appropriate terms and turn
them into more technical variations. These technical uses of words end up
being rallying points for certain groups of people to position themselves
behind. They end up being the foundations for different discourse
communities.

A prime example would be the machine learning and artificial intelligence
communities. Essentially synonymous, the researchers in these respective
fields have startlingly different agendas, approaches, and vocabularies.
Depending on the audience, the presentation of an artificial intelligence
researchers may seem ludicrous, ungrounded and unworkable to a machine
learning researcher. Conversely, AI folks think that the techniques of
machine learning are brittle, unambitious, and require too much human
intervention. Subtleties, I'm sure, but a piece of jargon begins to amass
innumerable connotations. What's more, some catch phrases have a
shelf-life. If you use a term which was the cat's meow at the last few
conferences, someone might suddenly scowl or laugh at the concept.

I think "multimedia" maybe be one such concept. In the late 80s and early
90's it was an extremely hot research topic. All the computer science
folks were clambering to have some multimedia angle to their work.
Private sector computing companies all started up high-flying media
projects. For instance, there is a section in Douglas Coupland's
Microserfs where he quips that: "In Los Angeles everyone's writing a
screenplay. In New York everyone's writing a novel. In San Francisco,
everyone's developing a multimedia product."

But like many other buzzwords, multimedia had one of those pyrrhic sort of
victories. After a brief flurry of activity, people began to point out
shortcomings: televisions, and newspapers were already multimedia (using
the strictest definition). Many of the earliest multimedia works were
clumsy, using glitz in lieu of content. Slowly the term has begun to
amass many unfavorable connotations. Writers themselves found that the new
forms emerging in computationally-driven media were quite constraining.
Paul Roberts wrote an excellent article on this theme in Harpers about the
"Sorrows of a Multimedia Hack".

The notion of storytelling has a different, but connected set of
connotations. Many linguists and discourse-analysis folks have invoked the
notion of storytelling and pointed to it as a paradigm around which to
structure interactivity. Reeves and Nass theorized the people related and
to and interacted with computers on a social level. Ideally, researchers
extrapolated, one could interact with a media in much the same way that
people interact with each other. The storytelling camp sought to reduce
this social interaction to the act of communicating stories. They seemed
to believe that if language and communication could be successfully
analyzed, then the most humane methods of working with interactive media
could be teased out. (Incidentally, I jumped on the bandwagon myself:
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/bulletin/1998.3/reynolds.html) But as a research
concept, people around here have used the term "moribund" to describe the
activity. That's not to say that if people aren't researching it, then it
doesn't exist; it is just that people have chosen to structure and think
about interactive media using different analogies.

Just as an exercise, if I type "multimedia storytelling" into a search
engine I get 380 hits. "interactive discourse" gives 687. "interactive
design" returns a whopping 60,600. In some senses synonymous, but the
amount of activity and the people allying themselves with these concepts
are markedly different.

-carson-

Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 11:45:03 -0700
From: Andrew Sempere 
Reply-To: andrew_at_andrewfish.com
To: Carson Reynolds 
Subject: Re: define multimedia storytelling

Hi. Here's an off the cuff brain dump... I have no idea if this is what
you were looking for, but the request was certainly interesting enough.

---
Multimedia Storytelling

What some would say:
---------------------
Storytelling is fundamentally multimedia. The original role of
storyteller (storyteller archetype - mythmaker, creator myth, shaman,
etc.) was a performance event, involving audience participation. At some
point in recent history, the richness of the story was replaced in
culture by passive, 2 dimensional, unidirectional entertainment.
Multimedia (esp.. interactive multimedia) promises to reintroduce this
element.

Why this isn't so
------------------
This, however, is over simplistic. It is not correct to say that the
storytelling performance is dead, nor that multimedia will resurrect it.
The stories we tell each other are perhaps more mundane, but the
performance aspect is still there. Think of a group of good friends at a
bar, slightly intoxicated, swapping stories. Someone tells a story that
focuses everyone's attention, and they tell it well, eliciting emotional
and physical responses, using props, lighting. Coupled with the
environment you have sensory immersion. Someone adds to their story and
you have a multimedia storytelling at it's best.

I think that it is a mistake to assume that multimedia (as in digital
multimedia) is anything more than augmented unidirectional
communication. Multimedia storytelling is a fundamental part of human
existence, digital multimedia is nothing more than a different (not
necessarily better, not necessarily worse) storytelling tool. Digital
multimedia will be at its best when it is a means of communication and
not an end. Many digital multimedia storytelling projects have failed
because they leave out this element: the storyteller. Or else the
technology tramples the story. Those that have succeeded have been
amazingly low tech (think of the vast popularity of _text based_
RP/Mucks/Moos/etc) because the signature of written text as a technology
is much less strong than, say, flash animation.

Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 14:17:04 -0400
From: Ben Piper 
To: Carson Reynolds 
Subject: Re: define multimedia storytelling - some quick ideas

Multimedia storytelling is an approach to creating an audience experience
where there is no limitation on the forms of media used. This method of
storytelling has the potential to be an extremely holistic and involving
experience. It can engage any one of the senses simultaneously giving the
audience an experience of an event rather than a description. In contrast to
conventional storytelling methods multimedia stories can directly involve
the audience by given them ability to interact with media elements. This
quality of real time interaction transforms what would otherwise be a
passive mental experience into an interactive physical experience. While the
form has the potential to conjure extremely convincing worlds the fact that
it relies less on the imagination than on representation means that it loses
some of the evocative qualities inherent in more conventional mono media
forms such as the written word, recorded speech or the two dimensional
image.

Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 16:31:57 -0400
From: "Benton, Stephen A." 
To: Carson Reynolds 
Subject: Re: define multimedia storytelling


My model is the classic one:  Imagine a child in the lab of an
intelligent, caring and perceptive adult with a gift for
storytelling, aided by a picture book.  Extrapolate from there.

Yeah, it is a little like the recipe for rabbit stew that begins
"first, catch a rabbit..."

...Steve...

Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 22:01:04 -0400
From: Marvin Minsky 
To: Carson Reynolds 
Subject: Re: define multimedia storytelling

I would say that this might not be a good effort, in the sense that
there may not be a good concept.  But your approach might be useful
if you get good responses.  Then take the 10 best of them and see
what they have in common.  And then, of course, give that a different
name, because no one will understnad the original one.

Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 21:55:24 -0400 (EDT)
From: danah boyd 
To: Carson Reynolds 
Subject: Re: define multimedia storytelling

Umm.. i am very confused by this.  

As far as i am concerned, multimedia storytelling is just storytelling
utilizing multimedia.  I think one of the biggest worries i have is that
we have separated the two, something i think is problematic.  Multimedia
is a wide variety of things that aid in storytelling, but storytelling is
still fundamentally the same - someone telling their story in a way that
is meaningful to them..

Please tell me what you are thinking/what you come up with..

danah

Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 13:50:18 -0400 (EDT)
From: Anindita 
To: Carson Reynolds 
Subject: Re: define multimedia storytelling



Hey Carson,

Sorry this has been delayed-- don't know if a response is still relevant.  
I'm not really an expert in multimedia storytelling, but here's my take on
it:

Multimedia storytelling is any way of presenting a story that mixes media,
whether that's video, sound, text-- it doesn't matter.  I'd argue that the
connotations of the phrase "multimedia storytelling" includes some sort of
computational medium.  So we could have a CD with a multimedia story of
the history of Mexico or something (sorry, the first example I always
think of is edutainment).  The story is a combination of text, image,
sound, video and contains interactive elements, and the reader can
navigate the story to some degree-- it's like the next level of hypertext
novels.

I don't know if this helps at all. . . what was your take on it and has
there been a consensus so far in responses?

Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 19:20:30 -0400
From: Paul Nemirovsky 
To: Carson Reynolds 
Subject: Re: define multimedia storytelling

multimedia storytelling for me is a meaningless concept 'cause i'm not
sure what "multimedia" means. storytelling on the other hand is about
filtering, just like meaning, just like cleaning dishes in my sink on a
Saturday afternoon. I choose what parts of the grease I notice, limit my
perception (or pretend that I'm limited by the nature and my eyes cannot
see). Then I scrub hard in one place, and satisfied with it, rotate the
plate to wash the other side.

Filtering is all our language does. A fairly primitive concept our
language is. We segment our being into parts, and arrange parts into an
ever-changing succession of patterns. Is it really what
storytelling/emotion/meaning are about? Hell no, but we feel comfortably
enough to call it so, just like I call my dish plates "clean".

What is the true meaning/emotion/storytelling for me? I don't think I can
do much better than that without resorting to reinventing language. Yes,
language is not the only guy on the block, and does not have a monopoly on
how we perceive our stories, yet when we tell stories we can do one of the
two things to avoid the fake "cleanness" of plates - either try to
circumvent the language boundaries by evoking all the concepts that we
like to name with names beginning with "meta-" (meta-cognition,
meta-language, etc.) or by putting language where it belongs - being just
one of the guys on our human block of knowledge and feeling - and going to
filtering of more expressive and less precise forms - such as sounds,
shapes, smells, and on. The latter one is what my research is about.

Paul

----

Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 10:18:30 -0400
From: "John S. (Jack) Driscoll" 
To: Carson Reynolds 
Subject: Re: define multimedia storytelling

well, the easiest way might be:
Multimedia storytelling connotes the telling of stories using more than one
means of communication including any combination of voice, sound, gesture,
art, photography, video and the printed word.  jack d.

Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 12:30:17 -0400
From: Jim Youll 
To: Carson Reynolds 
Subject: Re: define multimedia storytelling

Hey Carson. Lock me in a plane and suddenly all the mail gets answered.

I first met multimedia storytelling at an ELO concert ca. 1981, the
"Time" tour. The "Time" album told a roughly linear story, nothing too
subtle but a good emotional tale, plenty to get into and plenty there
to be slyly drawn in by the music... Pink Floyd the Wall (the video)
same thing... I am not as familiar as I should be with what people
around our Lab are doing, but popular computer-based attempts at this
same sort of storytelling seem to fall quite short of the achievements
of the better-funded bands of the 80's (or the 60's for that matter)
not to mention the shared creation of a moment that any well-practiced
DJ can pull off in a properly equipped club  (is the story being told
or written? Beats me). 

I guess for that matter I would consider a well told story in a dark
room on a rainy night with a fire going and shadows dancing on the
wall to be a multimedia experience. Maybe you were referring to
nonlinear narratives or interactive experiences on computers... in
which case, I either misunderstood the question or I'm just a
dolt... could be a bit of both. 

regards
- jim
-- 

Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 19:00:55 -0400
From: Barbara Barry 
To: Carson Reynolds 
Subject: Re: define multimedia storytelling revisited

hi carson,

late
but not forgotten

mulit-media: from wagner to virtual reality.
edited
by packer and jordan
(2001)

authors:
v.bush
j. cage
n.wiener
a. kaprow
+ more

a witty foreword 
william gibson writes
for "mulitmedia"
this book is
"where the bodies (or rather the bones of the ancestors) are buried"

with disbelief in movements!
barbara