Storytelling in a Digital Age
By Frances Forde Plude
[This essay presents reflections in connection with Dr. Thomas Boomershine’s work, on biblical storytelling. I am writing, not as a biblical scholar, but as a specialist in theology and in digital culture. Thus, I have, included some occasional thoughts on how storytelling today, in a post-literate world, may link to the biblical storytelling tradition explored in Boomershine’s work.]
In the media world content seems to die quickly. However, in the United States there is a weekly TV magazine program – called 60 Minutes – that is over forty years old; and the program is often #1 or #2 in the TV ratings.
Don Hewitt, an earlier producer of 60 minutes, was asked about the secret of its lengthy success in the rapidly changing TV world. He answered: “Four words: tell me a story.” Every week – in three or four segments on everything from Guantanamo to whistleblowers to heads of state to leading basketball stars, these segments are packaged as stories. Hewitt knew the story form is part of humanity’s unconscious. Whenever we gather each person is a story. We are, in fact, a collection of many individual stories; we are united because we have been transformed by stories about our God – by biblical stories. As my colleague Tom Boomershine wrote in his wonderful book Story Journey: An Invitation to the Gospel as Storytelling: “Our lives are story journeys” (p 16).
There is a basic and important fact to be mentioned here. In today’s global Information Society, the Scriptures can be a unifying principle; these are stories that have been shared globally for centuries. And I agree with Boomershine that the hermeneutic of today’s biblical scholarship (the sharing of stories and webs of relationships) ought to be linked to the hermeneutic of today’s digital culture.
I will explain why my own studies have led me back to stories. As usual with our studies, I have been engaged in an intellectual dialogue with key thinkers. I will introduce them as I move through my own ideas.
First, I will explore story as epistemology – as a way of knowing. Secondly, we should consider what happened when stories were technologized – when the Greeks and, later, Gutenberg (with writing, rational systems, and printing), culturally had an impact on oral stories, including biblical storytelling. And, thirdly, we are living now through another major revolution – the transfer from an analog to a digital world; here global cultures (and our stories) are being transmitted around the world by digital bits of data in computer software, by social networks linking our stories, by websites and by sociological shifts resulting from these computer network connections.
Many stories have been digitized spawning a global movement called Digital Storytelling (DST). I want to share this phenomenon so we can reflect together on how biblical stories are co-existing with digital narratives.
I was helping years ago to organize a session for the annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA). This was one of a series of annual presentations for CTSA that we planned on the concept of Communication Theology. In this program we were to focus on a dramatic and thoughtful TV series entitled Nothing Sacred. These stories featured a liberal priest with sincere self-doubts. Our speaker for the CTSA session was the Jesuit Bill Cain, the creator/writer of Nothing Sacred. He spoke about the controversy surrounding his stories as he created real characters with real problems. The series won numerous awards.
His associate, another Jesuit, Kevin Bradt, worked with us also. At that time, Bradt gave me a copy of his book entitled Story as a Way of Knowing. This work helped me to see the epistemological aspect of story. Bradt wrote: “As a medium of communication, story will structure thought. In other words, story is not just an art form but an epistemology, a technique or way of knowing the world, the self, and the other. Story as a way of knowing shapes our ways of interacting and relating” (p 3).
Bradt notes that scholars like Jacques Ellul, Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan and others “have done much to reclaim the oral-aural (speaking-listening) dynamics of story as humankind’s primary and oldest mode of communicating, thinking, knowing, and relating” (p 6).
We need to spend a little time here with oral storytelling origins and the transition to writing and print. Often consulted in this regard is Walter Ong, another Jesuit. Bradt notes that “Storying as a way of knowing, as a structuring of human consciousness and perception, was changed forever with the development of writing. Ong sees the various forms of writing, such as script, print, computer, as ‘all the same because … [they] are all ways of technologizing the word’ (p 20). Once I was lucky enough to spend a day with Ong in a small discussion group at St. Louis University. He came to our meeting because he was deeply interested in the conceptual alliance we were constructing between theology and communication.
In his essay entitled “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” Ong proposes some concepts I will simply list here; they are profound and concepts that most people have not thought much about previously:
Once words have been translated from dynamic, vibrating, changing sounds to the ‘rigid visual fixity’ of text, the words are ‘reduced to space, frozen and in a sense dead.’
‘Writing separates the known from the knower. It promotes ‘objectivity.’ By being removed from the context of the interactive personal relationship created by speaking and listening, the words of a text are radically depersonalized and altered…’
Texts change ‘knowing,’ an interactive dialogic activity, into ‘knowledge,’ an impersonal denatured object that one possesses.
There is a loss of immediacy in writing. ‘Writing distances the source of communication (the writer) from the recipient (the reader), both in time and space.’
Writing encourages administrative, bureaucratic, and managerial styles of relationship based on supervision and power.
In time, the word on paper becomes even more important and of greater concern than the world of human experience.
Oral speech and thought transfers experience and the environment, into narrative, whereas philosophy, which comes along after writing, is radically anti-narrative (p 44).
Storytelling became disenfranchised after Gutenberg, but it remains subversive because, as Bradt says, storytelling challenges as illusory the objectivity, control, and permanence that print technology brought to modern consciousness (Bradt, p 37).
Each of these concepts could inspire many moments of reflection and study.
We have now considered story as epistemology, a way of knowing, and we have some understanding of how the alphabet, writing and printing technologized oral storytelling. Now we should think about the implications of the reality that we now live within – another new technological revolution, a global digital technologized world.
A brief note about digital technology. In the recent past, messages (like telephone calls) were distributed utilizing analog (electromagnetic wave form) transmissions. This is now replaced by digital (computer bit) transmission. Once this change occurred it became possible to speed up the transmissions through time-sharing, compression, and other techniques. Optical fiber and internet links meant that more and more information (including music and video) could travel over these ‘information highways,’ making global distances irrelevant.
As Wikipedia explains: In multimedia applications, the digital revolution altered the storage of information previously located on fixed material objects (words in books, sound on phonograph records or audio cassettes, and images on film). Now all media could be stored as information in a binary digital format. And all this transformed digital information could now be moved easily between media and could be distributed and accessed remotely.
Now we need to cope with The Rise of the Network Society. This is the title of Volume I of a trilogy by the Spanish scholar Manuel Castells. His trilogy is entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. As a professor at the University of California at Berkeley for many years, Castells was right up the road from America’s Silicon Valley. And he was steeped in that culture. But the wonderful thing about his work is that his vision and his scholarship and statistics are global.
In the second volume of his trilogy, entitled The Power of Identity, he examines the impact of the Information Society on the project of the self, and the ability of individuals and groups (activist movements and nations, for example) to be linked together globally and with ease. Volume III, entitled End of Millennium, examines the collapse of the Soviet Union, informational capitalism, and the development and crisis in the Asia Pacific, among other topics. The scope of the work of Castells is both breathtaking and very, very solid.
In one of his essays entitled “Informationalism, networks, and the network society: a theoretical blueprint” Castells introduces these realities:
Communication networks are the patterns of contact created by message flows among communicators through time and space…networks process these flows…
Networks constitute the fundamental pattern of life, of all kinds of life. History shows the pervasiveness and relevance of networks as the backbone of societies, thousands of years ago, in the most advanced ancient civilizations.
Thus, there was globalization of a sort in antiquity; societies depended on others for their livelihood, resources, and the power of connectivity to networks beyond the limits of their locality.
Today digital technologies allow us to recombine information based upon interaction and feedback. This is usually referred to as Web 2.0 – the ability of almost any individual to create and re-create content (to become communication producers, not just users).
There are thousands of dramatic concepts within the Castells trilogy, but these few ideas give us a foundation for our study of the global movement known as Digital Storytelling (or DST).
As we have noted, storytelling as a way of knowing, and networking as a fundamental pattern of life – these have existed for centuries. And we have also seen that oral storytelling has become technologized by writing and by print. What happens to storytelling in a global digital world? How are bible stories and biblical scholarship altered in this global digital culture?
One answer, of course, is that humans form computerized, digital social networks. They tell their stories in emails – the most popular use of the internet. They use technologies like Skype, the free software that allows a person to speak to another person (or a conference of several people) no matter how distant the participants are from one another. And if the computers have a motion eye camera at the top of their computer screen, the people can see one another as they speak.
But people want more than that. So formal social networking sites like YouTube, Facebook and others have grown dramatically. Now people can have their own site on a social network, they can talk about their lives there, they can share photos, and they can invite ‘friends’ to share information from their own social network site.
And blogs are another whole segment of personal storytelling; millions of people have their own weblogs and share their ideas and stories daily on the internet. And podcasts facilitate sharing also.
It is almost as if people must tell their stories – no matter what century they are living in. The mode of transmission changes as the technology of writing, printing, and digitizing emerge. But people continue to want to share their stories.
There are some power dynamics at work here. The digital technology and culture represent (to a degree) a democratization of power as media stories are shared widely and as mobile technology makes it easier and less expensive. The concept and the actual format of DST, Digital Storytelling, emerged in the vicinity of the movie industry in California. But, as we shall see, it has become a global community of storytellers.
Joe Lambert, in California, is the author of Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. Lambert notes “I believe interest in digital storytelling grew because of the disintegration of our historic social networks” (p xix). He adds: “We approach the (digital) storytelling part of our work as an extension of the kind of everyday storytelling that occurs around the dinner table, the bar, or the campfire” (p 17).
At his Center for Digital Storytelling, Lambert runs workshops on how to bring a group of people together (called “a story circle”). Over a weekend, for example, with the help of facilitators, these individuals can learn to write a script for a short digital movie. They gather photos, and create the story in a digital format, with digital cameras and computer editing software. Usually these digital stories are three to five minutes long. Often the stories are about the person’s life, or a loved one, or perhaps individuals want to share ideas or causes important to them. The Workshop format helps individuals learn how to structure their stories effectively. Almost as important, however, in the story circle the group forms the bond that will enable them to confidently share stories and offer affirmation and constructive feedback to each other. As the workshop concludes, participants share their stories by viewing them together. Usually there are many tears shed during this sharing.
I urge each of you to think about how you would structure your own digital story if you had a chance to share it. With a little training, people tell their own digital story better than a professional writer would. And, clearly, this California workshop model is somewhat designed to provide therapy and to build community.
Here is a sense of the digital storytelling reach around the world:
There are DST programs in educational institutions in South Africa, in Japan, South Korea, Australia, Germany, Spain, Canada, throughout the United States, in the United Kingdom, and many other places.
There are some community centers and organizations in India where digital storytelling occurs. One program is called, appropriately, “Finding a Voice.”
I want to focus for a moment on work at the University of Oslo, in Norway. This program is directed by Professor Knut Lundby, a colleague of mine, who has long been interested in the intersection of media, religion, and culture. He heads the Mediatized Stories Project in Oslo.
Professor Lundby has edited two books exploring the impact of what he calls “mediatization” – a particular transformative logic or mechanism that does something distinctive (to “mediatize”) some processes or objects. Mediatization implies a process through which core elements of a social or cultural activity assume media form (Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories, p 107).
Lundby notes that the same year the first digital storytelling workshop was held in California, a path-breaking book by the Latin American scholar Jesús Martin-Barbero was made available in English. Lundby adds: “From his Latin American experience, Martin-Barbero knew how ‘the media’ could be used by power elites as a means of oppression…he moved the focus from the ‘media’ to the processes of ‘mediations’ (how audiences mediate their own media experiences)… This is relevant to digital storytelling as a practice and a movement.”
Martin-Barbero’s approach opens up connections with the history of people’s attempts at alternative ‘mediation’ that challenge the authority of existing media institutions” (p 182). One part of Professor Lundby’s research involves young people in a church who are creating digital stories. In fact, you can imagine how many young people around the world would be attracted to digital voices. This is their culture!
I hope these examples of digital storytelling will encourage you to think about your own story, about the fact that we all have stories to tell, and we are all enriched by listening to one another’s stories. As the American “Story Corps” program says: “Listening is an act of love.” Story Corps involves a bus traveling around the US recording audio stories. People can show up and record a conversational story about some aspect of their lives and these are all filed in the US Library of Congress – as an archive of American citizens’ stories. And every Friday on our National Public Radio network one of the stories is shared with everyone tuned in to the radio network. Sometimes a father and a son connect in the story and the father might share a story from his life that his son has never heard before.
It does not take much imagination to see that this storytelling is connected to biblical storytelling. Jesus told many stories. His disciples repeated His stories and added the stories about the life and works of Jesus.
Tom Boomershine, as a renowned biblical scholar, has long recognized the power of storytelling as an experiential part of the Gospels. Tom and his wife Amelia, both Methodist ministers, have conducted biblical storytelling workshops throughout the world.
Boomershine notes in his previously-mentioned book Story Journey: “In telling and listening to the stories of Jesus, early Christians made connections with their own lives that made clear to them how God was present. And the uniquely revelatory character of these stories has been confirmed in the experience of millions of people over the ages” (p 19).
He also notes: “Just as each woman and man has a distinctive storytelling style, so also each of us has a unique network of relationships. The stories of the good news are most meaningful when they are told by one person to another in the context of a personal relationship of care” (p 194). I would add that today’s digital culture empowers and expands these relationship networks.
However, Boomershine is also a student of the impact of digital culture on institutional religion and the stories we share. I have studied his interesting essay entitled “The Religions of the Book and Religious Warfare in Digital Culture.” Here is an interesting thought from that text: “…the reinterpretation of the sacred traditions and stories of the religions in the new communication technology is a crucial dimension of peaceful reformation. To find God speaking in the new technology calms peoples’ fears and makes a peaceful adaptation to the new culture possible. The reinterpretation of the central traditions of these religions in the languages and systems of digital media is crucial for a peaceful future. We need to demonstrate that our experience of God is not dependent on preserving an earlier culture and its media system” (p 6).
I will now conclude with some personal reflections as I researched the power of story in a global digital culture.
First, I find it useful to think of many of these ideas within the rubric of “distribution systems.” The early Christian, apostolic period distributed stories in oral narratives. Then writing and printing arrived as new types of distribution systems. Monasteries represented a unique distribution system with monks copying and preserving documents that were informational, liturgical, and scriptural.
Later universities and schools added a new distribution system, helping spread literacy and learning. In America, and other places, the Catholic Church built an unparalleled distribution system: Catholic parishes and schools, Catholic hospitals, and Catholic social service agencies.
As electronic and digital distribution systems developed some churches felt uncomfortable with these new systems because they were decentralized and harder to control. Unlike their previous domination of distribution systems, faith communities have, in many cases, underutilized these new digital forms.
Boomershine was one of the earliest scholars to urge the sacralization of new media. When the technology of printing emerged, allowing the printing of the Bible in German, the medium of printing was sacralized. He now urges the sacralization of the Bible in the new technology and culture of the digital media. He has urged biblical scholarship to make the Bible present in the digital communication system and culture. If this is not done it will represent an underlying problem for churches globally. What has happened, Boomershine notes, is that today’s digital culture is almost completely managed by for-profit groups, stressing sex and violence because this increases profits.
Communities of faith need to share biblical stories in a digital format with an emphasis on storytelling in creative ways. Many writers I studied have spoken of the way digital storytelling empowers people and builds community. Is it possible that by sharing our stories easily, digitally, across cultural divides, we can, in a grassroots way, offset the tendencies of religious and national groups to promote war? Communicating on mobile phones has turned out to be the computer of choice among the poor, for example. What opportunities exist here for networking in meaningful new ways with poor people around the world?
Digital storytelling and other such participatory tools can give a voice to the poor. This requires thoughtful insights and action on the part of all religions. An interesting digital-age question is: What would Jesus do?
In addition, newly developing nations and cultural groups can strengthen their sense of identity and national pride by systematically archiving their individual stories.
Social network sites have many millions of visitors each month (McKinsey Quarterly, 2/09)! This unlocks participation globally and demands a different mindset. The range of technological distribution systems includes blogs, podcasts, information tagging, wikis – the list is almost endless. Underused human potential can be tapped by participatory tools.
Think of digital storytelling as scrapbooks. (In the 21st century scrapbooking is a multibillion-dollar industry.) This desire to record and preserve can be traced back to the “commonplace book” of the Renaissance. Women through recent centuries have found their voice in the pages of scrapbooks they created. These collages of memories allow for self-expression and meaning by recording lives.
Finally, in developing their own story and listening to others, people can make the links between their own struggle and the larger social struggle. Individual stories add up to the larger story. By starting with your own story, and analyzing your own problems, a larger, even global, social consciousness is possible.
By hearing about the stories of Jesus today, through these new digital distribution systems and by sharing and connecting our own stories perhaps people around the globe can come to believe that the non-violence Jesus preached can truly save the world.