Week 1: Melissa De Lyser

The Scribe Video Center and the panelists involved in the Transmedia discussion are all about giving a voice to groups and issues that would otherwise be unheard.  For example, Jo Elle Kaiser of the Media Consortium said the organizations’ goal was to direct public discourse to compel people to action.  The example she provided regarding the Occupy May Day was fascinating.  Forty news organizations uncovering stories via various platforms had a significant impact on the types of stories – student debt, migrant workers, uninsured – that might otherwise have gone unreported.

The Community Visions support of “Face to Face:  It’s Not What You Think” gave voice to Asian-American teens.  Marc Smolowitz, the documentary filmmaker from San Francisco, talked about how his latest project “The Campaign” is using the timeline infrastructure of Facebook to allow ordinary people to share posts, photos and video on the changing same-sex marriage landscape and how it has impacted their lives.

The discussions around the processes that made these projects reality, while certainly worthy of discussion, were of less significance to me than the basic principle behind each project:  Story.  As discussed in The Storytelling Animal – humans have a need to share/tell stories.  The Transmedia discussion and Phillips case study certainly supported that idea.  The panelists and the Community Visions Project are either telling stories or providing the framework for others to tell stories.  In short, the organizations exist for story.

During the panelists’ discussion about transmedia terminology, at least one panelist alluded to the fact that while the terminology is important, it shouldn’t constrain creativity.  That made me wonder:  Is the same true of media itself? Are we, as professional communicators, in danger of becoming so involved in the emerging media  platforms that we lose sight of storytelling?  Can theses platforms come to hinder our creativity as opposed to enhancing it?

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4 comments to Week 1: Melissa De Lyser

  • lpaters5@uoregon.edu

    Melissa, first of all, I love your observation that “In short, the organizations exist for story.” It’s especially interesting to see these particular organizations advocating for social change, using community organization as the backbone of their media endeavors.

    I wanted to comment on some of the interesting questions you pose to the class: “Are we, as professional communicators, in danger of becoming so involved in the emerging media platforms that we lose sight of storytelling? Can theses platforms come to hinder our creativity as opposed to enhancing it?”

    In a particularly interesting and recent article by NPR titled “How Blogging And Twitter Are Making Us Smarter,” author Elise Hu references two pieces by writer and columnist Clive Thompson about how writing for an audience is actually changing the way we think. In his piece for Wired, Thompson says; ” Social scientists have identified something called the audience effect—the shift in our performance when we know people are watching. It isn’t always positive. In live, face-to-face situations, like sports or concerts, the audience effect can make athletes or musicians perform better—but it can sometimes psych them out and make them choke, too. Yet studies have found that the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to pay more attention and learn more.”

    It could be that we are checking over our blog posts on this very site more carefully than we would if we were simply handing a piece of paper to our professor. Since we know our classmates will be participating in this conversation and reading what we write, are we putting in more effort into being creative and interesting? Blogging is a form of social media, after all.

    In Thompson’s piece for The Globe and Mail, he sheds even more interesting light on the subject and cites research as well: “It used to be that students did comparatively little writing out of school; even if you were in university, there was little call for it, and few vehicles to showcase your writing. But now, as Prof. Lunsford’s research has found, 40 per cent of all writing is done outside the classroom – it’s “life writing,” stuff students do socially, or just for fun. And it includes everything from penning TV recaps to long e-mail conversations to arguments on discussion boards. “They’re writing more than any generation before,” [Prof. Lunsford] says. The members of “dumbest generation” aren’t just passively consuming media any more. They’re talking back to it.”

    To answer your question, I think there is a danger in becoming over-involved. If you stretch yourself over so many different media platforms, I think it’s far to assume that there is a chance for the story to get lost in the process. However, the fact that people are thinking differently when writing for an audience could mean that people are becoming more careful about what they say, including of course, those of us in the media world. Being limited to 140 characters on Twitter is sometimes a hindrance, but it’s also an opportunity to make your words or your message more concise and creative. Perhaps these platforms can enhance our creativity instead of hindering it. I will post the links to the articles below – I found them fascinating.

    How Successful Networks Nurture Good Ideas – Thinking Out Loud by Clive Thompson: http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/how-successful-networks-nurture-good-ideas/

    The dumbest generation? No, Twitter is making kids smarter – Clive Thompson: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/how-new-digital-tools-are-making-kids-smarter/article14321886/?page=1

    How Blogging and Twitter are Making Us Smarter – Elise Hu – NPR : http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/09/17/223357881/how-blogging-and-twitter-are-making-us-smarter

    • delyser@uoregon.edu

      Hi Lauren: Thanks for the links. I particularly enjoyed the Successful Networks article. I agreed with the general premises. Social media definitely gives people a reason to write and the information shared via social media is often thought-provoking and intellectually stimulating.

      My husband is a college music professor. Part of his course load is Introduction to Fine Arts, and he requires students to attend theatre and symphony performances and to visit galleries. His students then write critiques of what they’ve seen and experienced. He has received papers that contain text phrases like “LOL.” Sentences read like tweets. In one case, a student sourced another student’s Facebook post that had been written during the performance. (I’m all for real time, but posting on Facebook during a concert is not exactly the kind of performance etiquette a fine arts class aims to instill).

      These examples are the exception and should by no means be used to say that social media is making us all dumber. I don’t think we’re all in danger of writing only in 40 characters or less. But I do think that somewhere along the way, we need to be teaching kids that writing for social media isn’t the same as writing for class or business. You’d think that would be obvious, but apparently it isn’t.

  • Joel

    For a fair part of the video, I feel like discussions over what transmedia is seemed distracting and unhelpful. After Ingrid went so far as to say that transmedia can occur on one platform, Henry corralled the conversation again and provided what I felt were useful guidelines for understanding transmedia:

    “If we put your documentary that was on the screen on Hulu or Netflix, that’s not the same thing as additive comprehension, that is, building something in each of those media that contributes something to the whole.”

    He then contrasts the single-platform box approach to, “The sense of dispersal, and the process of finding things, gathering things, connecting things, bringing those pieces together, the radical intertextuality that some of us were interested in when we first began thinking about transmedia.” That radical intertextuality seems to be the defining characteristic of transmedia as the group describes it, and if transmedia creators lose sight of their project or become overly involved in emerging media, I think it’s likely because the did not begin with a clear concept of the bounds and purpose of the media they’re applying.

    Ingrid later comments, “There was a question earlier about how much interactivity to put into a project. My answer is always, as little as possible.” I think this is a great answer, because the concept of ‘transmedia’ almost seems to push is to want to use as many media as possible to get our message out. If we focus less on media and more on intertextuality, I think that danger can be avoided.

  • jarrattt@uoregon.edu

    Lauren, I really appreciate these articles and insights. I think they are helpful for me to see the value in twitter/blogging. No that I haven’t noticed the very powerful and impacting events that have been instigated/facilitated through social media, but I myself haven’t really felt the need/desire to engage with some of the more mainstream forms of it whole-heartedly. Knowing that there are such positive personal consequences helps it feel like a more important exercise. I guess I have had the fear of becoming over-stretched too. How can you be thoughtful and truly engaged if you are having to pay attention and manage so many different spaces. Not only could the story that your production is based on become muddled, but I feel like my attention could be too.

    Joel, I was wondering about the hulu/netflix comment from the discussion. Were they saying that putting your movie on one of those streaming sites doesn’t count as branching out, doesn’t make it transmedia?

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