Exploring the selections for this week, I find myself considering how digital media might allow storytellers to provide more direct access to the narratives they are attempting to highlight. Particularly with Public Secrets and Highrise, I’m struck by the subtle way in which the websites frame their subjects’ voices: as viewers, we lead ourselves between quotes rather than relying on a journalistic narrator, and in many ways I think the free-flowing style of these sites invites us to think critically about how each story relates to the next. This isn’t to say that Saving the Sierra doesn’t follow a similar model, but it’s definitely apparent to me that Public Secrets and Highrise had the resources and expertise to craft sophisticated digital foundations on which to hang their community interviews. The way in which we navigate these sites reminds me almost of the computer games marketed to children in the late 90’s, where you work your way through a storybook while clicking on certain characters to see them animate. Both play on our desire to prod things into movement, and both are effective at provoking unstructured engagement with subjects’ individual interviews. We don’t need a strong narrative voice because we invent our own transitions between the interviewee’s own voices in our head.
Of course, the voices are far from un-narrated. Highrise offers meticulously-constructed images of each apartment space, and both it and Public Secrets select abbreviated clips from what must have been far more extensive interviews. Is it really so much of a shift to switch from a strong narrative voice to one that curates fastidiously? Perhaps not…both direct the audience’s gaze. In the end, though, I do think the digital model we’ve explored this week offers more extensive quotations than what you would find in traditional journalism. I could see a radio program like This American Life focusing on the stories of incarcerated women, but I spent a comparable amount of time engaged with the Highrise website and all of it was listening directly to the interviewees’ own voices. That seems to me to be quite an impressive innovation.
I think you are on the right track, but I think you have to look at Saving the Sierra’s within it’s own context too though. It was started up right around the beginning of digital participatory media and thus didn’t have the same resources that were available to the Highrise or Public Secrets creators. I also think you need to look at audience as well, Saving the Sierras’ is geared towards people who don’t want to be pulled in by the flashiness of a Highrise, they most likely just want their information and move on. Meanwhile the others are geared more towards a younger audience who crave that interactivity.
I love your comparison of these projects to children’s computer games – perhaps the reason why I feel a degree of familiarity with them as I navigate through. There’s this invitation to prod at these works that seems to strike a chord with the earliest human instincts of exploration. I imagine a speechless baby exploring their environment. They’re not looking for a sequential story of how things work around them. Rather, they’re interacting with and testing different aspects of their surroundings to create a larger narrative structure of what exactly “reality” is around them. This is the same thing that is happening with Public Secrets and Highrise. Through self-directed exploring we are able to gather together different pieces of the puzzle to create a unified structure, and all-the-while forging this unique personal connection with it. It’s like each viewer is able to create their own “a-ha” moment, rather than having it be directly molded for you.
Not only does this create a unique and drawing form on interaction with each piece, but as you point out, it also allows us to have direct contact with the subjects. The narrator of the overall piece is the sub-conscious narrative going on in our own heads. I love this concept of knowing that potentially no two viewers will have the same direct lien of experience with each piece – it really breathes a sense of tangibility into each work.
I am glad to see that someone else besides me sees the similarity between computer games and these projects that we are viewing. It would be interesting to actually study video games played today and be able to compare them to these projects in more depth. Does participatory media include entertainment and recreation like online video games?
We will be looking at the organization and site “Games for Change” later, and I think there are tons of other game-like environments you could discover and explore, especially in the entertainment sector.