Short StoriesBUILDING A NARRATIVE WITH SOCIAL MEDIA SESSION 1, MAY 6, 2014

A thousand words?

We have always been storytelling creatures

And our lives are ‘storied’ We are multi-faceted and multi-storied

Aggregating and rearranging our social media postings can represent these facets

And, as long as we are alive and tweeting, these stories evolve

We can either be intentional or un-intentional autobiographers…

http://bit.ly/1iV9GlG

The medium for storytelling is always expanding

And the languages of story increase

Puck Magazine, 1881 Internet, 1980’s onward

Twitter 140 characters

Ability to embed:◦ Links◦ Images◦ Hashtags

Tweet anatomy

hashtagshashtags

linklink

retweetedretweeted

Feature added Fall 2013

No longer necessary to follow link to see images

Twitter – embedded pictures

Twitter – custom timelines

Introduced 11/2013

Allows users to curate tweets and create stories

Easily shareable◦ Re-tweet◦ Custom timeline widget

Instagram Capture images and video (15 seconds)

Smartphone app – Android and iPhone

Tags

Hashtags…narrative glue # used to group messages on many social networking sites A sorting and metadata mechanism 3rd party services can aggregate across social networks (eg, tagboard)

The Story Spine and Twitter Once upon a time...

Every day...

But, one day...

Because of that...

Because of that...

Because of that... n

Until, finally...

And, ever since then...

Curating narratives An experiment in storytelling

Working with 4-H youth to re-tell Romeo and Juliet using social media

https://storify.com/ptreadwell/performing-romeo-and-juliet-via-social-media

Tagboard

Storify

140 characters

https://twitter.com/twitterfiction

Storyboards and perspectives

From : Matt Madden – 99 ways to tell a story http://www.exercisesinstyle.com/

Developing, and breaking apart, a story

Just because the tools use 140 characters or 15 seconds of video doesn’t mean that the same rules do not apply.

Storyboarding and preplanning pay off

Once you have the story you can ‘parcel’ it out

Multiple medias allow for creative expression◦ Parsing out the action to twitter, dialog to video, scene transitions to images, etc…

Every story has a plot

Public Narrative Structure

Telling along ‘the arc of critical hope”

In stories that are meant to project our work forward we create an arc of the future.

A storytelling challenge – find and tell the arc of critical hope

Naiveté or despair are the easy arcs

Tech mediating the story Multi-medias

Peer interaction – it is ‘social’ media – opening up the telling to multiple perspectives, voices…

Stories as magnets or sponges

Contact Paul Treadwell

pt36@cornell.edu

paul.treadwell@gmail.com

@ptreadwell

http://www.paultreadwell.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.