Postdigital Storytelling

Poetics, Praxis, Research

Spencer Jordan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138083509
• eBook ISBN: 9781351621472
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Bibliotheks- & Informationswissenschaft

Postdigital Storytelling offers a groundbreaking re-evaluation of one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of creativity today: digital storytelling. Central to this reassessment is the emergence of metamodernism as our dominant cultural condition.

This volume argues that metamodernism has brought with it a new kind of creative modality in which the divide between the digital and non-digital is no longer binary and oppositional. Jordan explores the emerging poetics of this inherently transmedial and hybridic postdigital condition through a detailed analysis of hypertextual, locative mobile and collaborative storytelling. With a focus on twenty-first century storytelling, including print-based and nondigital art forms, the book ultimately widens our understanding of the modes and forms of metamodernist creativity.

Postdigital Storytelling is of value to anyone engaged in creative writing within the arts and humanities. This includes scholars, students and practitioners of both physical and digital texts as well as those engaged in interdisciplinary practice-based research in which storytelling remains a primary approach.

1Introduction

Fake news, folks. Fake news.

At the heart of this book is a radical re-evaluation of one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of creativity today, namely digital storytelling. Central to this reassessment is the emergence of a new kind of creative modality in which the divide between the digital and non-digital is no longer binary and oppositional. I term this condition postdigital. Although digital storytelling is a key focus, the foundation of this book remains, what I identity as, new and evolving forms of postdigital interconnectedness. As such, the book does not artificially separate digital from non-digital storytelling. Rather it seeks to explore and understand the emerging poetics of a postdigital condition that is inherently transmedial and hybridic, and in which the digital and the non-digital domains are increasingly entangled (Berry and Dieter 2015). Yet this entanglement is not without hierarchy; indeed, this book will show that the recourse to print is increasingly a strategic, even transgressive, act. In the postdigital age, it is the printed book that has become a signifier of functional deficit, a physical manifestation of ‘that which is not digital’ rather than any natural or intrinsic form of published work in and of itself.

By exploring both the affordance and affectivity of these poetics within the arts and humanities, this book also offers a significant re-evaluation of practice-based inquiry as a critical form of knowledge production within theoretical and research paradigms.

The book’s critical perspective is therefore wider and deeper than much of the previous work in this area. Crucially I place the discussion of contemporary digital storytelling within a more profound understanding of creativity itself. I argue that, with the end of postmodernity, we have entered a new ontological paradigm, an alternative way of seeing and understanding the world that has, at its heart, a different creative modality. While postmodernity is associated with irony and depthlessness, denying any sense of meaningful representation and action, this new age, what some have called metamodernism (van den Akker et al. 2017), embraces innovative forms of situated embodiedness. Critically, too, is a new ethical imperative from which comes a belief in, and desire for, affective action and change in response to social, cultural and ecological crises. In this new creative paradigm, then, creativity becomes a tactical intervention whose end goal is affective change, what Donna J. Haraway calls ‘troublemaking’ (2016). One of the core arguments of this book is that postdigitality is a fundamental feature of this metamodernist condition and not simply a product of technological advancement. As a consequence, postdigitality emerges from these chapters as a key marker of deep and sustained cultural and social change.

There are two significant consequences of these approaches for my argument: the first is that I necessarily push and extend the definitional boundaries of digital storytelling, an umbrella term that, over the years, has come to comprise a wide range of subgenres and tropes, from electronic literature to hypertext fictions. The critical perspectives taken in this book allows these rather tired concepts to be dynamically reconfigured. Here, postdigital storytelling embraces both formal and informal modes and forms, including social media and web-based platforms and apps; it embraces digital biography and non-fiction as much as fiction, prose and poetry. It is code, data, narrative and performance. It is collaborative and participatory as well as individual and personal. Yet it is also transmedial, foregrounding the postdigital mash-up where the divide between the digital and non-digital is porous and creatively fluid. As such, one of the innovations of this book is that it examines the response of traditional printed texts to the postdigital condition.

The second consequence relates to the relationship between postdigital storytelling and academic research. With these new configurations and modalities come innovative ways of thinking about the role and function of creativity as both praxis and research (Barrett and Bolt 2010). Specifically I argue how new interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary forms and approaches are needed, rethinking the traditional division between creative artefact and critical exegesis. In fact, I demonstrate how postdigital storytelling and transdisciplinarity are irrevocably intertwined, each the child of our new ontological paradigm. Storytelling has much to offer the research of global imperatives such as resilience and empathy (Bazalgette 2017), yet it is only by reaching across and beyond academic boundaries that such issues will be addressed (see Koehler 2017). And that reaching across comes not just from the arts and humanities disciplines. In the interdisciplinary terrain of science and technology studies, for example, Ulrike Felt reminds us that concepts such as situated knowledge production and performativity, ‘values, aspirations, and imaginaries’ (2017, 253), are equally important to those working within science-based disciplines.

The intended audience for this book is therefore threefold. First are authors, writers and theorists of stories per se. Since this book embraces the full panoply of output, from printed text, to completely digital work, with all manner of hybridic work in between, the book offers an opportunity to explore continuities and connections across creative modes that have traditionally been remote from each other. Second, are those interested in the wider role of contemporary creativity within a theorisation of postdigital normativity; and third, are those with a concern for practice-based research, particularly the degree to which new and innovative forms of storytelling can inform our understanding of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research within the arts and humanities.

Two wider phenomena form the context for this study. The first is the transformation of storytelling since the advent of the new millennium, driven by an ever-growing list of technological innovation. Chief among them are two interrelated global phenomena: the rise of smartphones and the growing ubiquity of social media platforms. These two things alone have radically altered how stories are both constructed and consumed. From being static, PC/CD-ROM dependent artefacts, the traditional digital story has been freed from its gilded cage. The adjective ‘hypertext’ has found itself replaced by an ever increasing list of arriviste upstarts (including, but certainly not limited to, shareable, locative, adaptive, mashable, generative, augmented, virtual and collaborative) as digital stories have been transformed by a new generation of functionality.

Alongside these recent technological developments, there has also been a concomitant rise in the perceived value and utility of storytelling per se within the arts and humanities. As I’ve intimated already, this is not specific to this discipline area, of course: as Boyd has made clear, stories play a fundamental role within human cognition more generally. In science and technology studies, for example, an exploration of how knowledge is (co) constructed, shared and challenged remains at the core of the field (Felt 2017) while in health sciences, storytelling has been used with great effect, particularly in the diagnosis, treatment and research of mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety and trauma, but also in the way clinicians share and understand their own reflective practice (for example, see Gabbay and le May 2011).

Traditionally, the value of practice-based approaches (such as storytelling) across the arts and humanities was itself rather neglected, denigrated to the methodological sidelines of those disciplines perceived to come within the remit of creative art and performance as opposed to the humanities (Barrett and Bolt 2010). Yet a brief overview of humanities disciplines will show that, over the last ten years, things have begun to change quite radically. As the Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities series is showing, disciplines as disparate as geography, archaeology, literature, linguistics and history have all, to some extent or other, begun to explore the potential of storytelling as a practice-based research methodology (see Smith and Dean 2009). What have been termed the ‘spatial’ (Cooper et al. 2017), ‘creative’ (Harris 2014) and ‘participatory’ (Facer and Enwright 2016) turns are transforming research across the humanities (and beyond), and this book will show how storytelling is an important element of each. As Estelle Barrett notes, ‘practice-led research is a new species of research, generative enquiry that draws on subjective, interdisciplinary and emergent methodologies that have the potential to extend the frontiers of research’ (2010, 1). It is hoped that this book goes at least some way in demonstrating the veracity of Barrett’s assertion.

It is these two conditions then, the growing affordance offered by digital platforms for storytelling, and the wider interest from arts and humanities disciplines in the value of practice-based approaches to knowledge creation, that inform the context of this book. By seeking to map this new and emergent terrain, the book is innovative and timely, both for the study of postdigital storytelling as a new creative modality, but also through an understanding of its specific impact on the arts and humanities disciplines.

Exploring the role of storytelling within the wider context of practice-led research will be key here. As Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean note (2009), such research needs to be understood as an essentially bi-directional process. In other words, practice-led research is as much about the production of creative output that leads to research, as it is about research in itself that then leads to creative practice. Smith and Dean call this an ‘iterative cyclic web’ and it forms one of the cornerstones of this work. Crucially, what I’ll be developing here will build on and extend Barrett’s ‘interdisciplinary’ methodology (in other words, research that crosses academic boundaries). Instead, and as I’ve already intimated, I shall be using postdigital storytelling as a critical focus through which to advance a more transformative framework for transdisciplinary research across and beyond the arts and humanities. In other words, the book seeks to prioritise research and methodological approaches that bring together both scholarly disciplines and non-academic stakeholders to explore what Jay Bernstein, in his study of transdisciplinarity, calls ‘the inherent complexity of reality’ (2015, 13).

Still life: politicians with smartphones

In September 2016, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate in that year’s American presidential election, emerged into a room full of supporters. What happened next produced one of the most controversial photographs of the campaign in which, according to Chris Graham of The Daily Telegraph, a crowd of ‘narcissistic’ millennials revealed their desperation to take a photograph with their political heroine (2016). In fact, as the person who took the photograph, Barbara Kinney, later made clear, the mass selfie had been Clinton’s idea.

Figure 1.1Hillary Clinton poses for selfies, Orlando, Florida, 21 September 2016.

Source: © Barbara Kinney/Hillary for America.

The photograph (as shown in Figure 1.1) is striking and somewhere within it is surely a message for our times. That message, however, is not about narcissism, at least not directly. Instead, what the photograph really shows, better than countless pages of statistics and graphs, is something that is all too easy to overlook today, namely both the speed and depth of the change to our everyday behaviour brought about by digital technology. Imagine going back in time, say to 2006, and presenting this same photograph to a group of tech-savvy young adults. They wouldn’t have a clue what was going on; go back even further, to 1996, and the bemusement would be even greater. Such confusion would not simply be created by all those strange silver objects in the crowds’ hands. It would also be engendered by the physical actions of the people themselves, that strange act of mass cold-shouldering, arms raised, as though not daring to lay eyes on what has emerged before them, and, like Perseus and his shield, gaze only at a reflection caught by whatever they are holding. There’s a word for that action of course. We know it but all of those living in our thought experiment wouldn’t have done. The term selfie only really took off in 2010 with the arrival of the front-facing camera on smartphones such as the iPhone 4 (Losse 2013). Yet its cultural impact has been precipitous. By 2013 the Oxford English Dictionary had christened selfie as their word of the year, having beaten such shortlisted contenders as bedroom tax, bitcoin and twerk. It is this speed of normalisation and technical acculturation that is captured by the photograph of Hillary Clinton. In this way we can see that the photograph acts as a kind of synecdoche of the wider technical and cultural changes that have transformed society since the advent of the new millennium. The selfie and the ritualised communal behaviour of its taking are the more visible reminders of just how fundamental has been the impact of digital technology on our lives.

One area where this influence continues to be acutely felt is in the area of storytelling. Storytelling of course could be considered to be a rather archaic term in itself, conjuring up images of night-time ghost stories told orally around flickering flames and dancing shadows. From an academic perspective, narrative or (hyper) textual construction might seem a better choice and certainly narrative and text are preferred by some theorists, particularly those approaching digital texts from a linguistic perspective (for example, see Bell 2010; Ensslin 2014; Ryan 2015). Yet storytelling captures something that perhaps is lost with other terms. For a start, the term neatly encapsulates two separate, though intertwined, elements: both the creation of a story and its telling. As a verb, storytelling helps to represent the underlying iterative process between making and telling, between the act of creating a story, and the separate, though interrelated, act of providing access to that story for an audience. Storytelling therefore prioritises both author and media (paper, oral, digital) as much as it does the reader. And, as we’ll see, decisions about, what might be termed, means of access, directly influence both the nature and form of the narrative. In other words, the process by which an audience accesses a story is as important as the story itself. In fact, the shift away from the traditional oral and paper-based forms of transmission, towards digital platforms and forms, only extenuates this phenomenon. The functionality offered by digital technology inevitably leads to a radical reassessment of both form and structure, perhaps best exemplified by the transformation of print-based journalism and the media sector (Gauntlett 2015). As John Naughton noted of the internet more generally, disruption ‘is a feature of the system, not a bug’ (2012, 4–5). As we’ll see, storytelling has certainly not been immune to its own form of disruption. In fact, the inherent transformative capacity of digital technology remains at the heart of this book.

Yet there is another reason why storytelling should be considered an apposite t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1 Pasts and presents Sheds, labyrinths and string figures
• Part 2 Into infinity Towards a postdigital poetics
• Part 3 Coda
• Index