Storytelling in Podcasts

I got hooked on Serial 1 (the crime story of the murder of Hae Min Lee). I skipped the second season and then doubled down on my love for Serial 3 (S-Town). I loved the artwork of the site, the topic of clocks and a man's struggles living in a small town. I even wrote a poem about it.

I've been thinking this last week about why I loved those podcasts. And I think it was all the great sound effects added in so you could really imagine the stories. Like novels, podcasts depend mostly on words and insist that you create visuals entirely with your imagination. It's always shocking later to Google pictures of the real people and modify your imagined versions of them. 

The Serial writers also piece-apart their stories well, segmenting them into different points of view and angles of meaning. Both stories illustrate the difficulty of digging out truths from tragedies. 

My Dad and I are always having philosophical arguments about technology and modern life over the phone. I live in Albuquerque and he lives in Cleveland. I usually put him on speaker phone so I can hear him better. One day my husband confided that he listens along and that we should have been recording podcasts of our conversations all this time. This is a strange idea to me. But someday I'll wish I had done it. Family story podcast might be very helpful for tracking our histories. Who cares if the audience right now is just your family. 

Two people talking is another type of podcast I enjoy, especially etymology podcasts like Way with Words and the older episodes of Lexicon Valley with Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo. But those aren't really stories outside of the longest story of our culture: the way language evolves. Those types seem easier to produce though. Story podcasts seem to require more effort and ambiance of sound.

Video Story Yum Yum

This week we looked at some video storytelling and it was delicious. An additional set of options are available to readers engaging with recorded film: staging, lighting, ambient sound. So much can be done without words.

I like the rough, observational Cinéma vérité of these blog stories, although you wonder if for all the roughness and bad angles, the shots were meticulously story-boarded and scenes set up to provide that feeling.

If I were to do anything like these video blogs, I would particularly try to imitate the imperfect, accidental-seeming, abstract camera angels of Marble Hornets and the ambient sounds of Connect with I. They both work subliminally to make you curious about what’s going on. They’re also beautiful abstractions of image and sound on their own. And they can be seen as a commentary on bad camera work and editing, like the 15-min show spoofing bad cable access, Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule. Some ugly, discontinuous things can be reframed to look interesting or beautiful.

These blog segments are addictively small (just one more potato chip…), like commercial-break segments, which is odd considering as a culture we’ve always proclaimed to hate those time slots of storytelling. Internet culture has maybe converted our brains into liking information being served up in this way. If our attentions were so short, we wouldn’t be able to binge watch TV shows and video blogs. But we don’t mind the segments being smaller sized for our convenience. When you think about it, there’s a lot more time involved in clicking the play button over and over again every two minutes. These stories demand that we commit to them again and again like needy friends.

Works Cited

Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule. Adult Swim, Accessed 21 March  2019.

The Best Part of Digital Stories

My fascination with digital literature is curious considering I love physical books. I think a book is an amazing piece of technology, indestructible unless you rip it, water it or set it on fire. And stories in books can last thousands of years and still be accessed (give or take an evolution of a language), unlike their computerized counterparts which struggle to last longer than a decade.

But that’s part of the fascination for me: what can books do that computer stories can’t do and visa versa. So the most important element about a digital story for me is how the story uses its affordances, or the unique properties of its machine, to tell a story in a way that a book could not. And related, how digital stories fail in ways that books do not. As C.T. Funkhouser says, "When people read a book, they never receive a message that a page doesn't work" (193).

So point of view, tone, theme, setting, plot, and conflict: all these are all important to a story, but for me the device is everything, how does it work to unveil setting, conflict, tone and plot with branching choices, interactivity and all the baggage of online culture.

For example, the story "De Baron" by Victor Gijsbers (2006), (view Mark Sample’s walk through video, 48 minutes, warning: very difficult content), uses gameplay format to force the moral decisions of the “hero” on to you. This is something a book cannot do very well. Readers of books are given the distance of non-participation. Readers are allowed to feel like witnesses rather than participants. In gameplay however, readers suddenly become culpable for their choices and the results of those choices feel very visceral. Suddenly, all the dangerous choices in this game become a metaphor for very tragic choices in a human life. The medium gives the story a startling and tragic affordance, just by offering (or forcing) the reader to deal with the responsibilities of choice.

Of the stories I've read in class, I still appreciate how “The Dionea House” used its mechanisms and all the functionality of blogging to tell its tale. This story would not work the same way on paper. The characters, plot and conflict all evolved over multiple blog posts and a plethora of comments where sub-plots unfolded. Transformation and point of view unfolded over multiple blogs:

This is the original display of the main story, a blog of emails compiled by the character Eric to tell friends and family about the tragic disappearance of their friend Mark. The blog format provides assumed implications of a community readership because of the fact that multiple readers can access a web page at the same time, unlike readers of a book.

The author uses the date stamp functionality of blogs, which works to build suspense over time. 

The inserted emails also make use of email affordances (subject lines, date stamps and uncanny, undeliverable messages).

Eric also starts a personal blog when the public blog garners too much attention. This illustrates how easy it is to jump to other channels for storytelling (starting a new blog is usually free, after all). His thoughts turn much more personal here and so the blogs contrast each other in tone. His last comment attracts hundreds of comments, both real and fake, which work to increase the uncanny ambiance of the story. Everyone else is alarmed about Eric, so we should be too.

Jenny’s blog is a great example of an abandoned blog, started with the best intentions but left like so much Internet debris. However, a fascinating thread of comments lies beneath its surface. The author uses hidden comments like Easter eggs.

The babysitter Dani gives us our first glimpse into a first-hand account of someone operating from inside the house! Her blog is a good example of characterization through blog functionality (the mood barometer and her ASCII character emotive faces and teen-speak).

In contrast, Loreen’s blog is a first hand account of the house but from a tough-talking, gritty homeless woman.

All the blogs hide story elements within the functionality allowed within the blogging platform and Internet machinery, which provide experiences in reading unavailable from a book.

As a reader you can choose to read only part of the story or follow every comment trail and link to the sub-blogs and creative blogger profiles. Or you could choose to read only the surface story. It’s very similar to "Infinite Jest" readers who refuse to read the nine-hundred plus footnotes in the back of that book. You can do that but you miss plot points that way. The blog format allows an author the opportunity to explore all the options of date stamps, comments, html and blogger culture and David Foster Wallace, likewise, was exploring the limits of what a physical book’s footnotes could do. Because a book is a machine, too.


Works Cited

Funkhouser, C.T. "New Directions in Digital Poetry." Continuum International. 2012.

Gijsbers, Victor. "De Baron" walkthrough video by Mark Sample, YouTube,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-iuO6gq0tk&feature=youtu.be,  Accessed 9 March  2019.

Heisserer, Eric. “The Dionaea House.” Creepypasta, http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dionaea_House. Accessed 9 March 2019.

Heisserer, Eric. “A Quiet Space.” Blogger, http://dionaeahouse.blogspot.com/. Accessed 9 March 2019.

Ohdanigirl. Adventures in Babysitting, LiveJournal, https://ohdanigirl.livejournal.com/.  Accessed 9 March 2019.

Levin, Jennifer. Missing Since Sept, Blogger, http://jennylevin.blogspot.com/.  Accessed 9 March 2019.

Mathers, Loreen. loreenmathers, LiveJournal, https://loreenmathers.livejournal.com/. Accessed 9 March 2019.

Wallace, David Foster. “Infinite Jest.”  Back Bay Books. 1997.

Game Play Stories: The Joys and Frustrations

I was unexpectedly out-of-town this week and spent a while trying to download [text] A Summer Story by Ayu Sakata. I was tech-blocked by my work Mac, my husbands iPad and our two Androids. But this pretty much maps to my prior experiences trying to get Wallpaper by Dreaming Methods to work. It's a visual story I've been trying to read for years. I even bought a game stick to use with it. But none of the computers at my disposal (work or home) are powerful enough to play it.

This is very frustrating. I really want to experience these stories. They do read like stories to me because there is so much text, enough to qualify as a read. And the walkthroughs I've seen, including this one for [text] (warning: the narrator is a teen/young kid and some may find his irreverent comments offensive) make the stories seem very appealing in an immersive way.

For instance, the immediacy of the choices put to the reader (whether by clicking link options of a branching plot or making decisions on movement through a space) place a sense of anxiety in the hearts of readers. This enhances the conflict, makes you part of the conflict. You're culpable in the outcome, after all. By literally putting the plot in your hands, a reader takes on a feeling of responsibility.

The effects of the image and sound don't make it any easier on you. You are primed to feel fear or happiness when sounds and images are presented to you.

[text] felt overwritten to me and there were five to ten minutes of reading that would go by before any choices were to be made. The editor in me says this could have been tightened up by half.  Walk throughs don't let you explore all the different endings either so I'm hoping to get another chance at this story when I'm back at a PC.

I did enjoy how the story had two fields of reading: the phone text itself and the running interior monologue to the right. Sounds and pictures are also "read" in a sense and it would be interesting to know how others chose to order their approach to "reading" each available element. Did you notice the picture and sound first or consider those after reading the text?