The Digital World of Story Telling

Week Eight

After reading an excerpt from Bryan Alexander's The New Digital Storytelling, I was enlightened at how the all-encompassing digital story telling platform had evolved. Story telling has been around since the beginning of mankind. While virtually every culture has historically had some lore to tell and a traditional way to communicate it, through the digital ages the storytelling mechanisms have been in a constant state of evolution. From the formation of the computer, internet, email, blogs, social media, and video gaming; one can only imagine what the future of digital story telling may unfold.

Good storytelling is an art form and consists of a well crafted narrative which compels audiences to feel emotions. Some equate it to a precise formula. In McKee's five stages there needs to be an incident which becomes progressively complicated with a crisis, climax, and resolution. With the Freytag triangle there is a rising action, climax and falling action in the equation. Sheila Bernard believed that tension builds an audience. While Ira Glass and the Mythic approach share the encode/decoding theory to building an engaging story.

For me a great story has to be credible. If I can not believe a story as I read or listen to it, my mind begins to slip away and I lose interest. Here too, non-fiction story telling is in a category of its own. After researching the top Google searches of the 100 most popular keywords, it is clear that I am not alone. It appears that many people search out non-fiction stories via Google searches daily. Non-fiction storytelling normally presents a problem based model that people can relate to in some way. The characters may change while dealing with the challenge, but still remain in character, relatable, or at least believable (unless they are not credible). The tension of the true story is what builds the audience, but the story development may be ongoing. The emotion, meaning, and engagement is what drives the audience. Google has made a living at providing products and a search engine to deliver what people want for decades. The truth of digital story telling power lies in the Google search data.