MIT has created a "Center for Future Storytelling".
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/medialab-plymouth-1118.html
quote:
Storytelling is at the very root of what makes us uniquely human," said Frank Moss, Media Lab director and holder of the Jerome Wiesner Professorship of Media Arts and Sciences. "It is how we share our experiences, learn from our past, and imagine our future. But how we tell our stories depends on another uniquely human characteristic -- our ability to invent and harness technology.
It does? How'd technology get into this? Why can't we just tell stories?
There's more:
quote:
The Center for Future Storytelling will be co-directed by three Media Lab principal investigators: V. Michael Bove Jr., an expert in object-based media and interactive television; LG Associate Professor Cynthia Breazeal, a leader in the field of personal robots and human-robot interaction; and Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar, a pioneer in the development of new imaging, display and performance-capture technologies.
Not a single storyteller among 'em.
I expect they'll make an interactive online multiplayer game about this kid who gets tired of the virtual zap-pow gee-wizz world and goes a-hunting and discovers this mysterious cavernous place lined with shelves of things that look like bricks but are made of thin slices of white stuff all glued together along one edge with squiggles on which he deciphers with the aid of a robotic mentor and they turn out to be ... stories.
Ludditely,
Pat
Movies and games have certainly amplified storytelling for those who enjoy a good boost of visual and aural stimulation.
But they have not replaced the written word, nor do I think they ever shall.
I respect your Ludditish ways, TaleSpinner, but keep in mind that the video game industry does employ more and more fiction writers. I expect this to grow in the future.
I recently saw a DVD called "Southland Tales". I'd never heard of it and I guess it was widely panned when it came out.
It blew my mind. The damnedest thing I ever saw.
One thing I found extremely exciting was the way a lot of the first part (before it settled down and had more of what we think of as a plot) was the use of a lot of TV/computer/game console visuals on screen. Wouldn't work as well in a theater, I think, but seeing it on my computer the look of viewing some sort of future blackberryboy input center with sidebars and flashing ads and news feeds and other weirdness in side panels and popups.
I immediately saw it as a sort of future genre.
Well, I could easily see something similar with eBook reading devices. The applications for scifi would be totally wow, but I could also see it in other applications.
I like web design and graphics and hypertext and whizzbangs. I see strong possibiliis of this sort of thing in the future and see nothing particularly wrong with it.
As soon as you have people reading whatever will eclipse the evil, monopolistic, fiendish Kindle as the main eLit application you have a sort of perceptual/technological vacuum crying to be filled. You can do searches and hyperlinks now. Should you not?
You can do all sorts of cool video/website/game stuff. Should you not?
You know what nature thinks of vaccums.
(Actualy the idea that nature ABHORS vaccums is overstated. You want somebody who abhors vacuums, it's a cat.)
One thing I'd stress in this stuff is the difference between adapting existing writing to new media--sticking "Gone With The Wind" or something into a cyberzap mode--and work created expressly for new media and not workable without it. A novelization of "Southland Tales" for instance, would be absurd.
I have been doing a lot of video poems lately. (Hey, I'm a poet, I embrace futile gestures)
Here is a simplistic illustraion of what I mean:
This first poem was already written (do NOT give me a hard time about it: it was written in like minutes for a contest about "Red" and I saw the painting at my friend's studio and....)
Not sure this is really all that valid a use of video for poetry. (better than all those yawners of some knucklehead reading his poem on camera, though)
MY LIFE IN RED
This one was done from bottom up as a video poem, the inspiration evolving out of a chart showing hand signals for soldiers or SWAT teamers or something. Writing the poem out would be ridiculous, it grew out of the visual build.
SIGNALS
[This message has been edited by LintonRobinson (edited November 26, 2008).]
Yeah... well, honestly, I'm kind of excited by the whole thing. Gaming pretty much IS the new medium for storytelling, and it has more potential than any other medium in the history of, well, history. Granted, virtually all of the potential is ignored by the industry. Some of the best evidence of this would be the late Baldur's Gate PC games, on the Infinity Engine, that allowed people to play through epic stories, longer than any novel, with well-written characters and scenes, and plenty of options to take the story wherever the player wanted the story to go. Real cool stuff.
Actually, I'm currently wrapped up in trying to do something similar... a nonfiction essay, posted online, wrapped in the guise of those old "choose your own adventure," books, only you don't get an adventure... just a short "autobiography" of some guy (me) that can go in dozens (hundreds?) of different directions.
It's a helluva lot of work, though. It's a single essay, maybe three pages per read--but I have to write it dozens (hundreds?) of different ways, struggling to make each "path" interesting and unique. Ideally, I'd want it to be something of a collaborative work--you start out at a screen and choose when and/or where you want to be born, and are taken there at random. I'm sorry, I'm probably not articulating myself well. Never have been good with that.
Anyway, how many times have you (plural) ever read something, or watched something, and thought to yourself: "wow, that was really stupid." Or, "I don't buy that at all." The cool thing is, eventually, *that* won't have to be stupid. We won't have to buy *that* at all.
Er, sorry if I went off in an unwanted direction with the topic premise, but I felt this was as good a place as could be found.
But about this topic, I think that it'll be a really cool invention if they could do that, but it would never replace things like novels. There is just something special about a story that is written down.
The human mind is the best tool for creativity; no technological device could measure up to the endless creative potential of the human mind. I sound like a PBS program.
Oh, has anyone read "The Reality Bug" by D. J. MacHale? What if the future America becomes immersed in and obsessed with virtual reality because it's better than real life? Maybe I'm thinking too much into this, ahahaha!
I think something like that happened just a week or two ago, actually. Some kid died because he was playing an MMO for 2 or 3 days, straight.
quote:
It will draw on technologies pioneered at the Media Lab, such as digital systems that understand people at an emotional level, or cameras capable of capturing the intent of the storyteller.
With this hyper-studio at the ready, someone still has to decide to say, "It was a dark and stormy night." But if the gaming industry is any indication, the "world" will be the star and the narrative and dialog will be a second thought.
"...and I've got the master recordist, best roboboy, IT artist, roboactors...did I forget anything?"
"Writer?"
"Oh, damn...um, can anyone here write?"
I don't see story-writers being replaced; someone has to create the story, regardless of the changing technology. In the future they might wonder "why are they called writers? What's writing?"
If you have an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure style of presentation, and the "facts" and outcome can change, is it really a story? Sounds more like a story generator. Or a series of stories woven around each other.
Most of the technology change is only to the wrapper around the story. I don't really care how fancy the cover is, or what kind of dinosaur hide it's made of...
As in: why do they call it power of the press? Who uses a press anymore?
The pen is mightier than the sword? What are they talking about?
You're right, writers will be the last ones to get replaced. The rest of it can be done by AI. Maybe not as creatively, or differently creative. But there will be a demand for writing as long as their are humans to read, see, jack in, whatever. Gotta have stories.
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
http://www.elsewhere.org/hbzpoetry/
One example, it's difficult to teach children who don't know how to read to sing songs. I can be there instructing them but it's still easier to hand them a paper with the words on it and they read it and sing. Also, information can be more tightly compacted in text. With sound you can only have one thing at a time, while a lot of information can sit in front of you with text. If writing as a form of storytelling will ever go away, I think it would have become extinct with the motion picture. You get a complete story and no reading required, yet I still sometimes prefer reading.
MIT Media Labs are full of some of the smartest people on earth, inventing some of the coolest new ways of thinking/technologies/stuff around. Storytelling as requiring technology, well, I think the speaker is a little guilty of hyperbole there, but the fact is, technologies open up new storytelling avenues for us. And for those of us who like to write sci-fi, technologies help create the fodder for the stories, too. I think it's all cool stuff, and I have to say I like the idea of some really smart technologists (they're not storytellers per se, but then again how many of us have other careers and tell stories on the side?) having influence over moviemaking. I think there's a lot of opportunity for cool technology, and better storytelling, in film.