Digital Story Telling

Hey, Richard Dalton again. Recently, Richard turned me on to the whole concept of Digital Storytelling and introduced me to one of the movers and shakers in the field, a San Francisco entrepreneur named Dana Atchley [Ed. note: he died in 2000. His website died in 2014]. You can see what he is up to at www.nextexit.com and www.dstory.com [site died in 2016}. You can even use the latter URL to sign up for his digital storytelling conference. I intend to. [The Europeans are keeping up the tradition]

It's kind of hard to explain, but the basic idea is people have always told stories, but now they can tell them with some digital help that doesn't get in the way of the storytelling, but rather enhances it. This has both personal and commercial implications. The San Jose Mercury had a great story on the subject, from which I pulled this quote:

It's one more example of rapid technological change fed by basic desire. In her 1997 book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, MIT humanities Professor Janet H. Murray puts it this way: "The human urge for representation, for storytelling, and for the transformational use of the imagination is an immutable part of our makeup, and the narrative potential of the new digital medium is dazzling."