NARRATIVE DESIGN

Created: January 23 2020

When is the last time you heard of stories? Was it through videos, pictures, podcast, or posts? If most of the stories you heard are from your digital devices, rather than oral stories from people you personally know, welcome to the digital age of storytelling!

Originally, “storytelling” advocates the old storyteller, prominent from the pre-agricultural and agricultural society, tied with a bardic tradition, a speaker captivating an audience (Alexander, 2017). Stories are spoken and heard, whereas cyberspace is a world apart, with all its cold domain data. But to get the best of both worlds, we must understand that data, without meaningful patterns, are cold, while stories are warm. With new pieces of communication technology being invented, it is vital to realize that people will continue to tell stories through those devices (ibid).

There are many definitions of story that clashes with other media, therefore stories in general means “objects (books, movies, documents, etc.) with meaning” (Alexander, 2017). For Ken Baskin, since we are surrounded by countless information nowadays, he explains how we, as human beings, manage this is through the focus on interconnected treads, “storytelling…is the human survival tool” (Baskin, 33). By organizing and arranging events in a story, the process of storytelling makes meaning out of chaos we live in; it brings harmony to our world, views, and perspectives (Giddens; Weick). As Jan Shaw (2013) concludes in his book about storytelling, “Stories and storytelling are integral to the development of the social; they hold cultural beliefs and form communities; they form new kinds of knowledge.”

With the said theories above, this will help us explain stories and storytelling through the use of narrative structures. There are four prominent types of narrative structure: Freytag triangle, Tzvetan Todorov’s rule, Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of Folk Tale, and Complex Three-Act Structures.

Let’s take the LEGO’s success story on how they were able to use transmedia narrative to make them one of the most powerful brands. There were two points that highlights the success of their transmedia storytelling,  that “children love the ability to construct their own worlds” and “The LEGO Movie perfectly captured this cross-generational appeal” (DeMott, 2015). As an aspiring programmer to work in the entertainment industries, I’m interested to learn more varieties of narrative techniques and will help to enchant my audience with my content, such as blogs and artworks because I want to “lend colour (and meaning) and interest to their everyday lives” (Watson & Hill, 2015).

References

Alexander, B. (2017). The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media (2nd ed.). Santa Barbara: Praeger.

Baskin, K. (2005). Complexity, Stories and Knowing. Emergence: Complexity and Organization 7.2, 32-40. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ken_Baskin/publication/242418170_Complexity_stories_and_knowing/links/5405d1f00cf23d9765a75dec.pdf

Cambridge Dictionary. (2019). Story. Retrieved from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/story

Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity.

Shaw, J. (2013). Story Streams: Stories and their Tellers. In Storytelling: Critical and Creative Approaches. London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:https://doi-org.ezproxy.newcastle.edu.au/10.1057/9781137349958

Watson, J., & Hill, A. (2015). Narrative. In Dictionary of media and communication studies (9th ed., pp. 197-198). London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. London: Sage Publications.