With the exception of The Interview Project, I was not as engaged by the digital media I reviewed this week as I was in weeks past. In some cases it was the content. In others it was the production.
I read the mission statement and the guiding principles section of The Mapping Memories project before watching the videos. The philosophy and goals of the site were quite substantive. I was struck by the awareness and insight that the organizers expressed with regard to participatory media, “What must we be cautious about when navigating this seemingly democratized, utopian terrain of creation and distribution when dealing with difficult stories?”
Yet I had issues with the site. First of all, there seemed to be a significant amount of self-promotion – The book, the workshops, the media tours – that seemed to diminish the feeling of “story” that was prevalent throughout the Precious Places and WITNESS sites.
Then there were the Verizon ads. While dog in the Darth Vader costume was pretty darn cute, he was, after all, part of a commercial. I realize that ad revenue is often a necessary evil, but it impacts the legitimacy of the Mapping Memories site in comparison to other participatory media sites.
The Center for Digital Storytelling site says it provides “effective tools for change amidst a world of technology and media overload.” Again, interesting goals. The site was well done and professional. Yet, like The Mapping Memories, the site felt commercial. While CDS did not have ads on the site itself, because most of its videos were linked to YouTube, advertorial content was inherent.
Many of the videos on both The Mapping Memories and CDS sites were not really videos. They were very well-done slideshows with voiceovers. The stories were, for the most part, significant and compelling. I enjoyed “The Sofa Story,” which was extremely compelling and filled with wonderfully rich verbal imagery, and “Context of Character,” which detailed the story of an African-American woman’s struggles against racism in Colorado in the 1960s. Others, like, “Alley Cat,” the story of a young women’s grandmother who suffered from Alzheimer’s, left me unmoved.
I couldn’t stop watching The Interview Project. Everybody has a story. The man by the side of the road, the woman mowing the lawn of the church: the stories aren’t championing a cause or creating a call to action. Rather, they celebrate the art of being human, complete with all the faults, troubles, joys and imperfections that make something beautiful.
The missions of Mapping Memories, The Center for Digital Storytelling and The Interview Project aren’t that different. Each site is committed to preserving story. But The Interview Project used video footage of subjects in home their environments. You could see the regret on “Judy’s” face and the fear that her children would have a life that was no better than hers. You saw her wipe tears off her face which looked much older than her 42 years. Patrick, the homeless man from Portland, had no hope; he made me feel hopeless, too. Lucille from Ohio, who described herself as “a mental patient,” left me feeling terribly depressed.
I just didn’t couldn’t relate as well to subjects of Mapping Memories and CDS as I could to the subjects in The Interview Project. Bottom Line? The Interview Project did it better, and as a result, it involved me more.
It seems to be a theme for many of the posts so far that people felt Interview Project was the most compelling. I actually spent the least time there and the most time out he CDS website and Mapping Memories website, and I found these stories moved me more. The CDS stories, two of them moved me to tears; maybe that says more about me. But also the stories of the refugees were very moving because genocide. Damn. Genocide. Awful. I can’t even seem to articulate it. But I am so interested in their stories of survival in the face of genocide. I can sympathize with homeless people or people who are mentally ill or poor or have girlfriends in jail or kids they don’t know anymore, etc, but I was more fascinated by the stories of people who survived genocide, and by the CDS stories, than I was by the interview project.
I also found the Center for Digital Storytelling videos to be pretty hit and miss. The better-made ones, like “Content of Character” were much more moving, for me, than the ones that were essentially not much more than a slideshow with someone talking in the background. I think that says a lot for quality and aesthetics. If a video is poorly made, even if it has a great message, people will generally move on to the next one.