By auditing my own online media use for a week, I was able to shed light on my habits and make a significant discovery that could allow my creative practice to take advantage of the internet. For this essay, rather than evaluating my online media use as a whole I have chosen instead to explore that discovery, and extrapolate it forward to some logical extensions relevant to media makers like myself.
Perhaps the most powerful affordance of digital media is that it’s network-ready by default. Since the internet is a digital medium, it’s trivially easy to upload artefacts of sound, video or text to the internet, where they can be hosted and distributed around the world with universal accessibility (Siapera 2012, pp. 3-4). By using hypertext to create links and relationships between such media artefacts, practitioners can open up the powerful new dimension of multi-platform storytelling, where the constraints of old media no longer apply (Alexander & Levine 2008, pp. 41-42). Using such techniques, authors can create experiences that are self-directed by the audience and may not necessarily be consumed in the form or order envisioned by the author (Alexander & Levine 2008, p. 47), but which to the audience feels significantly richer, more autonomous and more immersive as a result.
A current example of media makers using such techniques is the S-Town podcast, which released its entire series of seven episodes during the week I was auditing my online media use. Immediately after the series went live the S-Town Facebook page was updated with photos taken by the producers from locations significant to the story, links to further discussion, and other material that allowed listeners to get a fuller picture of the podcast and its characters. This material was not essential to the story, but for audience members who desired a deeper understanding of its central themes the multi-platform component offered a number of ways for them to remain engaged in the story. In my personal experience, while listening to the podcast I was able to hop over to the S-Town Facebook page, to Wikipedia, reddit and other web-based locations to fill in gaps in my knowledge (particularly around clocks, which form a central symbol in S-Town as the main character is an antiquarian horologist). This altered my experience of the podcast in a major way, particularly when compared to other narrative-documentary podcasts that don’t have such strong web presences. As social media becomes further enmeshed into society, this kind of user-directed engagement with media will only continue to increase (Hinton & Hjorth 2013, pp. 2-3).
S-Town was produced by the team that made Serial, a podcast series that made even heavier use of its web presence and social media platforms to tell the story of Adnan Syed, a teenager convicted of a 1999 murder. When each episode of the podcast was published, the Serial website was updated with supporting material like maps, letters, timelines, and real-life evidence from the case, giving listeners a rich tapestry of material to combine into the complete murder-mystery story. Serial was such a runaway success that it has been called the “most popular podcast in the history of the form” (Carr 2014), with its success attributed to the story’s extensive depth and the quality of its reporting.
I have made tentative use of multi-platform storytelling techniques to support my own media practice in the past, though I am yet to embark on any major storytelling projects of my own. In 2016 I made a three-minute short film about my brother, who has kept a collection of dozens of novelty rubber erasers for 30 years. The film contains a number of close-up shots of individual erasers from his collection, and separate to the short film I uploaded extra photographs of his collection to Flickr and embedded the gallery in my blog, allowing my audience to get a closer look at the subject of my film. This is admittedly a very cursory, surface-level experimentation with multi-platform publishing, but it illustrates how using networked media (and free platforms like Vimeo and Flickr) opens up a powerful ecosystem for media makers like me even on a small scale.
Multi-platform storytelling offers exciting possibilities in a number of other disciplines, too. For example, a tourism and travel brand could combine online media like Google Maps, streaming video, photography and podcasting to create an interconnected series of city guides and walking tours that are self-directed, nonlinear and allow travelers to experience a city in a way that best suits their own interests. A team of journalists could take advantage of some of the advances associated with Web 2.0, such as multiple authors and “microcontent” (Alexander & Levine 2008, p. 42), to collaborate on a story that takes an event or incident and unfolds outwards, forming a single whole with multiple entry/exit points and the ability to update the story indefinitely. Museums could use new media to bring new dimensions to their physical collections. Fiction storytellers could experiment with subjectivity and experience in their narrative projects. Educators could use networked media to allow students to learn at their own direction and at their own pace.
There are, of course, significant risks that must be considered when using online media in creative practice. By weaving a work into the fabric of the internet — such as by using existing publishing platforms, or by allowing the audience to drop in and out of the story and complete their own research — the author necessarily loses some control over the experience of consuming the work. In extreme cases, the question of who can lay proper claim to being the “author” of the work could even be called into question. There is also a risk associated with the fact that stability and longevity depend on internet access and hosting being available and affordable in perpetuity. Many early examples of multi-platform storytelling, cited in academic studies and media guides, are now no longer readily accessible on the web. One important example, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated news series The Crossing, was lost when the newspaper that published it went out of business, and the series (which consisted of 33 articles plus supporting photography and video, all presented in a bespoke online interface) was only saved because the author happened to have the series backed up on a DVD (Lafrance 2015).
But assuming the risks can be adequately mitigated, the potential new avenues of expression and creativity enabled by network-connected, multi-platform storytelling far outweigh the potential risks and disadvantages. As a media practitioner I’m excited by the sheer number of opportunities presented to me by new media, even as those opportunities also seem overwhelming.
References
Alexander, B. & Levine, A. (2008), ‘Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre’ in Educause Review, 43(6), pp. 40-56.
Carr, D. (2015), ‘‘Serial,’ Podcasting’s First Breakout Hit, Sets Stage for More’, The New York Times [online], <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/business/media/serial-podcastings-first-breakout-hit-sets-stage-for-more.html>, [accessed 9 April 2017]
Hinton, S. & Hjorth, L. (2013), Understanding Social Media, London: SAGE Publications.
Lafrance, A. (2015), ‘Raiders of the Lost Web’, The Atlantic [online], <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/raiders-of-the-lost-web/409210/> [accessed 9 April 2017]
Siapera, E. (2012), Understanding New Media, London: SAGE Publications.