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EducausE
r e v i e w
November/deember 2008
Definitions and Histories
What is
Web 2.0 storytelling
? As the phrasesuggests, it is the telling of stories using Web 2.0 tools, technologies, and strate-gies. Since the name is fairly recent (andnot yet widely used), it may not bear outas the best term for this trend. Anothername may emerge, one better suited todescribing this narrative domain. How-ever, the term seems to have met withquiet acknowledgment to date, so it may serve as a useful one going forward. Tofurther define the term, we should beginby explaining what we mean by its firstpart:
Web 2.0
. Tim O’Reilly coined
Web 2.0
in 2004,
1
but the label remains difficultto acceptably define. For our presentdiscussion, we will identify two essentialfeatures that are useful in distinguish-ing Web 2.0 projects and platforms fromthe rest of the web:
microcontent
and
socialmedia
.
2
The first feature,
microcontent,
sug-gests that authors create small chunks ofcontent, with each chunk conveying aprimary idea or concept.
3
These piecesare smaller than websites in terms of in-formation architecture and are meant tobe reused in multiple ways and places.They are also often much smaller thanwebsites in terms of the amount of storagethat each chunk takes up: blog posts, wikiedits, YouTube comments, and Picasaimages are usually only a few thousandbytes. Some types of microcontent, ironi-cally, can be quite large from a storageperspective but are self-contained—namely, audio (podcasts), video (for webplatforms, such as YouTube), or embed-dable Flash applets. Their uploading tothe web is a simple matter for the userand does not require anything in the way of web design expertise. Even creating awebsite through Web 2.0 tools is a radi-cally different matter compared with thedays of HTML hand-coding and of mov-ing files with FTP clients. Creating Web2.0 content requires only making a few selections from menus, choosing froma variety of well-designed templates, oradding a page name to another, already-established wiki page. One outcome ofthis authoring approach is a drastically lower bar for participation and publish-ing. Although some faculty membersmight hesitate to learn a website editorsuch as Dreamweaver, an arcane methodof FTP, and local campus web directory structures, they can now begin telling theworld about Mideast politics or biologicalprocesses after spending only five min-utes learning how to use Blogger or Wiki-spaces. The technology thus becomesmore transparent; attention is focusedon the content. As a result, the amount ofrich web media and content has grown inquantity and diversity. And any student ofhistory would not be surprised to observethat out of those manifold ways of writingand showing have emerged new practicesfor telling stories. A second essential component to Web2.0 is what we used to refer to as “socialsoftware.” Although Web 2.0 tools now generally offer multiple levels of pri- vacy, and therefore hosta growing amount ofcontent inaccessible toa broad audience, Web2.0 platforms are oftenstructured to be orga-nized around peoplerather than the tradi-tional computer hierar-chies of directory trees. Websites designed inthe 1990s and later of-fered few connectingpoints for individu-als, generally speaking,other than perhaps a guestbook or a link to an e-mail address. But Web 2.0 toolsare built to combine microcontent fromdifferent users with a shared interest: ablog post and a comment; a Deliciouspage for a URL with many different usershaving bookmarked the same URL; agroup of Flickr photos from differentpeople connected by the common use ofa descriptive tag; or multiple authors in asingle wiki page. If readers closely exam-ine a Web 2.0 project, they will find thatit is often touched by multiple people,whether in the content creation or via as-sociated comments or discussion areas. Ifthey participate actively, by contributingcontent, we have what many call
socialmedia
.Combining social media with micro-content yields a series of synergistic ef-fects, including conversations that occuracross multiple sites and with multipleconnections in between. A blogger postsa reflection. Another blogger adds a com-ment to that post, with a link to a related video. A third writes up a post on
his
blog(which may automatically send a “ping” tothe original blog post as a connection). A fourth describes the conversation so farin her podcast, thus adding more com-mentary. Such distributed conversationsoccurred and continue to happen onother web platforms and, arguably, can befound in other venues (e-mail listservs,Usenet groups). But Web 2.0’s loweredbar to content creation, combined withincreased social connectivity, ramps upthe ease and number of such conversa-tions, which are able to extend outsidethe bounds of a single environment. Dis-tributed discussion offers many points ofentry, both for readersand for co-writers. Andit offers a new environ-ment for storytelling. Another influentialfactor of Web 2.0 is
findability
: the use ofcomprehensive searchtools that help story creators (and readers)quickly locate relatedmicocontent with justa few keywords typedinto a search field.Social bookmarkingand content tagging add more tools tohelp share or recall what has been found. With findability connected to a grow-ing amount of media content licensedunder Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/), the authoring processagain becomes both easier and morefulfilling, with increased access to high-quality microcontent.Defining the second part of
Web 2.0storytelling
—that is,
storytelling
—is an easierproposition, partly because we have a far,far greater tradition of recognizing and re-flecting on it. Storytelling is a rare humanuniversal, present and recognizable acrosscultures and epochs. We can refer to it asthe “art of conveying events in words,images, and sounds often by improvisa-tion or embellishment.”
4
Annette Sim-mons sees the storyteller’s empathy andsensory detail as crucial to “the uniquecapability to tap into a complex situation
Two essentialfeatures are usefulin distinguishing Web 2.0 projectsand platforms fromthe rest of the web:
microcontent
and
social media
.
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