UPON starting this blog it seemed appropriate to make some kind of reference to the well-worn Warhollian maxim regarding the future, fame and something about a quarter of an hour. The truth is though that thanks to the likes of You.tube, ordinary people are now eligible to far more than a paltry 15 minutes of celebrity ephemera.
The ability to tell a story is the bread and butter of a journalist’s craft, yet increasingly the audience is able to do it for themselves. Often, the easiest way to get a story is to let the subject tell it firsthand, and this is precisely what we journalists are doing with increasing regularity.
The question you may rightly ask is why? The government’s drive on digital literacy coupled with the ease with which people can record, edit and publish video content, could arguably be yet another nail in the coffin of the printed word.
Perhaps, but maybe video journaling represents something that mainstream news often struggles to capture: a connection with its audience. When writing news story journalists will frequently target the human-interest angle; good stories are, after all, about people not things.
BBC Wales certainly seemed to take this view with its “Capture Wales” online video series. Between 2001 and 2007, journalists at the BBC appealed to viewers to come forward with personal stories, and then assisted them in the production of them. Each video has to conform to strict guidelines: around 250 words spoken in 2 minutes, resulting in succinct but highly personable storytelling.
As successful as the Capture Wales project appears to have been, it prompts the question as to why people feel compelled to record aspects of their lives. Traditionally significant events have been chronicled primarily for posterity, but can the same be said for personal tales? At the risk of contradicting myself, it could be argued that good stories can also be as much about places as people.
In Toronto, a group of activists have taken the significance of environment and concept of Psychogeography and created a rather curious project known as “Murmur”. Murmur represents a citywide project combining mobile phone technology and the personal stories of local inhabitants.
The stories, relating to specific locations and landmarks, are pre-recorded and identified by code-bearing signs posted within the area in question. Anyone with a phone can enter these codes and listen to a story regarding an aspect of their surroundings, thus lending instant familiarity to an unfamiliar location. In the words of the Murmur team the project:
“Brings uncommon knowledge to common space, and brings people closer to the real histories that make up their world.”- Murmur Website
Murmur is undeniably outlandish and could be dismissed as an inconsequential exercise in sociological whimsy. At the very least though it highlights how digital technology has impacted the way in which people can view and interact with their surroundings.
At a time when journalists are forever being lambasted for not engaging with their audiences, multimedia narrative proffers a simple and effective remedy. Maybe we should all just get with the programme?
