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Q: How did you get into digital storytelling? A: I first started traveling around as a performance artist in the 1970s. I'd do a performance, evolving from a traditional multimedia show I did which involved five slide projectors and me playing my guitar and switching my projectors with my feet and traveling around the country as a performance artist known as the Colorado Spaceman. I had a company named A Space Co. Q: Are you from Colorado? A: No, I was born in Boston, went to Dartmouth and Yale. At Yale, I studied graphic design under Paul Rand and Walker Evans, a wide variety of very influential people. At Dartmouth, I had my own press and printed books. On my Web site now, it's almost like an extension of doing that, but doing it online -- with film, animation, video, voice, text. I saved everything in my life and now it's useful in storytelling. I was thinking digital before the Digital Age. I was frustrated by my inability to combine all the media. I got my first camera at the age of 7. I have kept every family scrapbook that was in the attic: [They] date back to 1865. I've saved every scrap of paper, documenting my life and my family's. It's a rich visual library now for family stories. So when I first got my hands on digital technology, it was wonderful. And the Internet is just another great tool to create stories. Without the Internet, this wouldn't be quite as remarkable a potential possibility. Why? The act of creating stories is just part of it. Until you can share those stories -- that's the completion. And the Net lets everyone share stories, as never before. Q: How can corporations use this? A: Many corporations have archives, rich with textual, photographic, and video imagery. Like individuals, corporations also have stories. It's the "Who am I?" story. That's what these stories are really all about. "Who am I, and who are we, and where have we been? Where are we going, and what do we care about the most?" It's the Genesis story. When I work with corporations, just like when I work with individuals on how to put a digital story together, I ask people to point back to the time...when we could say that if this event hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here. In my personal case, it's the time when my great-grandmother got shipwrecked in the South China Sea in 1916 and was attacked by pirates. That's when she decided to marry my grandfather. She wrote in a diary during the attack: "I felt that if he were here, this would have all been taken care of." The point is that if that shipwreck hadn't happened, she wouldn't have married him, and I wouldn't be here to tell these stories. Q: That's very compelling, and personal. A: The best digital stories are very truthful, emotionally honest, and database-driven. With any corporate database, you have many stories and have to decide what to show and how to show it. With Coke, it's all about what the brand means to people, individuals. If you understand what your brand means to individuals, personally, you can understand the core value of your brand. The stories are primarily about customer relationships with the product. Every story is set as a brand story and has really meaty and real takes on brand. This notion of branding, traditionally, was a way to take a bunch of wild animals and sort them out and know who owned what. Essentially we're in that arena again, with a need to separate one company's worth and meaning from another in a really crowded marketplace. So how do you do it at the end of the day? If you're not heavily invested in how the Net can help you do that, you're really going to lose the brand battle. And many corporations have rich archives to help them tell these kinds of stories. Q: And these stories: Customers drive them, and they can be zapped around and distributed -- even to another's PC. Personal stories delivered in a personalized way? A: Exactly. You create a community of customers. And this stuff is scalable -- Internet, extranet, intranet, live performance, CD-ROM, kiosk. And you can apply it all to use for telling stories -- legacy stories, recruitment, training, orientation, sales, branding, you name it. We're talking about community identification. You can't say stories aren't important in the corporate world today. In our knowledge-based economy, knowledge is embedded, shared, and remembered best in a good story. What the Internet has done is allow everybody to participate. Up until now, that participation wasn't possible. The first breakthrough came in the 1960s, with instant printing, xerography. Even prior to that, very few people could replicate the printed word. It was very expensive. You did it for birthdays, funerals, weddings -- and whose stories got remembered? If you were famous, or if you were an author, your books got printed. But other than that, there weren't many histories or stories that got handed down. Think about how many voices got lost. And now, we have this Tower of Babel. It's all out there. I have this theory, which I call "Who cares about cats?" Who cares about people's personal stories? Isn't that boring? If you type in cats or felines you get responses of up to 3 million on one of the search engines. And you think to yourself, "Hey, there are a lot of people who care about cats." And not only that, what have you got? You've got a community. And if you take 10,000 stories out of that, there are going to be some worth spending a few moments with. And out of that, there's got to be a hundred worth publishing or broadcasting. And out of that, there's maybe going to be at least 10 that warrant a feature story or a movie of the week. And maybe one that might even deserve a feature film. So who cares about cats? The point is, many people do -- for many different reasons. So it's all about context. Who cares about Coca-Cola? You'll find a lot of people who do, and believe me, you're going to find stories that warrant sharing. Q: So companies are just starting to catch on to this? A: Yes. Our digital-storytelling festivals started five years ago with mostly artists and creators. Last year? I'd say half or more than half were corporations. This year, we're adding a content track to the festival. And then there will be a conference that precedes that, dealing with issues like marketing, corporations, education and nonprofit, personal, and arts and entertainment. All about building communities, tools, and building the future. Q: Who are the big corporate players in storytelling right now? A: For making the digital-storytelling tools? Macromedia, RealNetworks, Intel, Apple. Apple has the best technology and has made a commitment to digital storytelling with its iMac. You can plug your digital camera in. They've got a program called iMovie, and in 10 minutes you can make your own movies -- full screen, regular movies. Go to broadcast, go to tape. And they're getting the notion that it's not just creating the stories but sharing them -- that's what this whole thing is about. Q: Who's using it inside, for change? A: Yes, digital storytelling can be an excellent tool for change. Value and belief systems, the Executive Development Associates are using that internal-change stuff, and they will be doing a digital-storytelling seminar in Crested Butte [Colo.] in September. They work with high-level executives. They see storytelling has a great potential for change, identifying belief and value systems and where the corporation is going. So they're doing that. Advertising agencies are also looking into this. J. Walter Thompson attended a workshop of mine, for example. Q: What about an online company looking to establish some kind of brand? How does an online company use digital storytelling to build brand and loyalty? A: I've always been a fan of living history. With digital storytelling, you see brand contextually, how the product has played into peoples' lives. I had found letters in the Coke archives, for example, dated in the late 1980s -- all from men who had carried bottles of Coke with them through World War II. We did a lot of research on this. Well, all the men had died, but I found the daughter of one of them in Indiana. To her father, Kevin, the Coke was a lucky charm that helped him survive through the war. He repaired trucks and bulldozers. He took six bottles with him but kept one unopened. He carried that bottle with him, from 1942 to 1945, and finally, he carried it home. The Coke bottle became a prized family possession. This stuff, especially with a company like Coke, is just there for the mining. Q: So when you do this stuff, do you bring a team with you? A: Yes, a writer. A story like Kevin's about Coke didn't need writing. Other times, some brand stories need a good point of view to make them work. Then you need an online editor. We had a fabulous animator work on the project. A researcher, too -- in this case, it was my wife, Denise. And the online editor shot most of the piece. He has done hundreds of stories. It's all a Mac-based editing system that we use. Q: You've inspired all these other people to tell digital stories. How widespread is the storytelling movement now? A: I see myself as an evangelist. I like getting people excited about the potential of stories to reinvigorate brand or to let voices get heard, which otherwise would not be heard. Four years ago, if you wanted digital storytelling, you couldn't get it from anyone but us. Now, dozens of people know what it is and are doing it. Q: Because this is so emotionally resonant, these stories, they're very powerful. Is this akin to benevolent propaganda? A: I guess so. What's propaganda except a point of view that you're putting forward that you want people to believe in? Others have suggested it's a way to bring people deeper into corporate culture and that all this branding stuff is a horrible way to make people think the way you want them to think. Of course, that's what politicians do, too, don't they? Everyone's trying to get people to believe in something, whether to sell something or get people to vote for something or sit down and spend some time with you. These stories can be richly told, they are highly personal and emotional. And with the Net, they can be distributed, at virtually no cost to anyone. Imagine the power of it. Imagine the voices that haven't been heard but which can be now. The communication power of it all is awesome to contemplate. |
