THEORIZING STORYTELLING

 In the past 2 weeks in etmooc, we have explored digital storytelling which to me is yet another means to construct our realities though narrative. So here are my thoughts on storytelling, and one could simply add the adjective ‘digital’ to the word ‘storytelling’-I feel the  purpose of telling story is the same even when employing web tools.  There is no right way or wrong way to tell a story. Stories have the power to bring us together. Hawaiians call it ‘talk story’.

We are storytelling creatures and should have been named Homo Narrator rather than Homo Sapiens. The narrative mode comes naturally to us as a style for organizing thoughts and ideas.

 If humans in general are storytellers, it is particular individuals who give authority to narratives that make us human – the functions of story and the choice to survive connect powerfully.

Stories create a vocabulary of understanding – each person lives a story; each person shares his or her story with others – stories unfold frames of reference. Stories give order to complex realities.

All our stories, and the recognition that we all have responsibilities as storytellers, is what can keep the knowledge born of our experiences alive. We are authors of the stories we live and  we share authorship of other people’s stories through the reading or listening of them.

For most of human history stories have been passed on through an oral tradition – writing stories is relatively new in the history of man. The world is made up of many oral traditions- time immemorial stories which make up a cultural consciousness often invisible to an outsider. The sharing of stories allows an outsider to gain some insight into the structure of cultural thought.

 Knowledge is embedded within stories and their telling.  Historically, the sung stories and the numerous ceremonies to which they were linked were in a sense the living encyclopedias of a culture – carrying and preserving the collected knowledge and established customs of the community – and they themselves were preserved through constant repetition and reenactment.

One can view oral traditions as the sustained thought within that culture. The oral tradition is linked communication between generations. Examples of this are mythologies and stories from Native legends, myths and stories from the Greek heritage, the oral mythologies from Slavic heritage or the stories from Celtic and Norse heritage which served as the foundations for Grimm’s Fairy Tales within the Western tradition. Homer’s Odyssey is an example of a text drawn from a rich oral heritage of legend and mythology.  The Persian  Shahnameh is a collection of stories of the lineage of kings of Iran mixed with the legends and folklore of the country; this text is well known, read and recited by all Iranians. Harry Robinson’s “Write it On Your Heart” and “Nature Power” are examples of contemporary efforts to preserve an Okanagan Valley storyteller’s knowledge of the stories of the Lower Similkameen Band within British Columbia, Canada.

 The oral traditions of most cultures are part of a highly contextualized discourse which assumes familiarity with shared  stories, codes of behavior, values, beliefs, perhaps biography and shared experiences.

 Ironically to ‘crystallize’ stories into text – fixes the ‘living stories’ of a culture in time. The dynamics of the spoken word are lost in the technology of writing. The ‘existential’ context of direct experience for meaning is lost in the standardized form of the written word.  Perhaps the addition of Web 2.0 tools allows for greater synesthesia of the storytelling experience.

 From Ceremony -Leslie Marmon Silko: “You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories.”

“He cried at the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together – the old stories, the war stories, their stories – to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was; no boundaries, only transitions through distances and time.” (Ceremony -M. Silko)

Here is my attempt at using Storify. I collected some web stories on ‘Oil and BC’-a topical issue in British Columbia.

Here is an etmooc digital story I attempted to get off the ground with participants during the etmooc digital storytelling weeks: https://plus.google.com/u/0/112076250988242598096/posts/CfNBr399o4D

Why narrating complex ideas works. The RSA Animate  Revolution