‘Social media’ conjures up thoughts of instant internet communication, global chatter over the web, computers, mobiles, tweets, posts etc. But there is a communication form that predates these modern tools – political street art. Street art can be dated back to ancient Egypt and throughout history it has been employed by those with a political point to make.
I've had a few questions about how I put together the research for posts. With websites, blog posts, podcasts, videos, social media, and all other kinds of digital flotsam mucking up the internet...it has become increasingly complicated for journalists to keep an up to date notebook for gathering research material.
Here are a pair of tools I use almost everyday to help me keep track of everything:
In this special Pilot episode of the new Modern Mythology podcasting series, Rusty Shackleford takes time to have a sit down chat with Howard Bloom. Many of you know Bloom from his books The Lucifer Principle, The Genius of the Beast and The Global Brain, in addition to his interviews and appearances on the Disinformation television series originally produced for the BBC.
In this interview, Rusty discusses Howard's role in helping to build relationships between artists such as Prince and Joan Jett and their public, touching upon the role of the artist as a modern day myth maker and the heir apparent of the shaman. Bloom's scientific and biological perspectives are also examined in conversation, particularly in reference towards the cultural myths explored and exposed in his newest book The God Problem.
Background music for this episode provided by members of Bradley The Buyer, HoodooEngine, Mankind is Obsolete, and Veil of Thorns. The featured tracks are In The Flesh from HoodooEngine’s album “Murder The World” and Bradley The Buyer’s cover of Prince’s “When Dove’s Cry”
The Transmedia Revolution has begun!
Which side will you join?
An empire of greedy corporate media cartels?
Or an ancient and mysterious order of storytellers... Image via Panicposters
After years of study, I've come to realize that contemporary storytelling—books, film, television (and to a significant extent, even live theater)—are a completely passive medium. They are narratives that lack interaction and any kind of participation from their audience. These mass-produced mediums of entertainment are more appropriately labeled "story-showing,” then storytelling.
People often wonder why there isn’t anything "new" in Hollywood. Why is it that every movie, TV show, and most popular literature, tastes like reheated "leftovers" disguised with some kind of mystery sauce? It’s because after a century of industrialization, we've become indoctrinated as a species of “story consumers.”
We’ve been raised to passively swallow the shallow narratives presented to us in our extended childhoods; schizophrenic mythologies filled with stories that have no depth, meaning, or purpose--other than to entertain (or perhaps more sinisterly, distract).
All of our modern entertainment (all of our stories) are almost entirely mono-active.
Our “entertainment industry” is simply a convenient medium for a 24/7 multimedia stream of consumer subconsciousness—peppered every fifteen minutes with commercials, product placement, and other forms of materialist propaganda. Even traditional literature has become a victim to this malaise.
The Lost Art of Storytelling
Parents who "tell” stories to their children, usually aren't really “telling” them. They’re reading them word for word from a book; an example of modern mono-active story-watching. Unless the child occasionally takes control of the narrative, thus making it interactive (I.E. "No, Red Riding Hood had a cell phone, and she called the cops on that mean nasty wolf!") the true immersive, and transitive aspects of storytelling are neutered, or even entirely absent in our modern fictions.
Is modern media a "big bad wolf" that
devours creativity and imagination? Image via Wikipedia
If you put your book down, and “tell” a story to your audience (instead of read it), something about your story will always change, each and every time you tell it. Unless, of course (as you’ll find in live theater), you have your lines memorized.
This is because even when you tell the same story (with the identical characters and plot), you’ll always be a different person each time you tell it, and so will your audience (even if they’re the same people):
If you told a story to a group of recent college grads (while they were partying around a campfire in the middle of the wilderness) the crazy things you did to get into your career field…would that story be identical to the one you told to a classroom of second graders, the day after you lost your job?
If this is the case, does "storytelling" in its interactive sense, still exist in today's society? Perhaps...
Thanks to new combinations of divergent media platforms, a new kind of storytelling is on the rise. One that recognizes the importance of engaging an increasingly distracted and impatient audience: transmedia.
After more than thirty years of fits and starts, a storytelling revolution is finally about to begin. Naturally, the catalyst was a book; surprisingly, however, it was a high school text book...
Immersive and interactive digital books will soon be jumping off screens everywhere... (Image via Creative Commons)
Earlier this week, Apple announced the release of iBooks Author, a new content creation platform for their ubiquitous iPad. However, unlike most of Apple’s hardware or software announcements, this one has seemed to garner little public interest. This could be attributed to the fact that according to Apple’s keynote, the only things that were “unveiled” were a new kind of digital school textbook, and a software program to make them.
School, text books, and reading…ho-hum.
The average person is as likely to sit through a keynote presentation on those two topics, as work on their taxes for fun. And this new software isn’t even wrapped in shiny high-tech aluminum: a baby iPad to combat Amazon’s encroaching Kindle Fire. As I watched the footage of the keynote, and it become apparent there was going to be no iText, iTome, or iTablet reader—just a pair of “un-Jobs” like Apple executives walking the audience through the pages of a digital biology text book—I was sorely tempted to give up early on the hour long presentation.
Apple Education Keynote, January 2012
But I’m very glad I didn’t. It isn't often that you get the chance to be on the ground floor of history as it happens. Stop, and bookmark this moment in your life (it happens right around time marker 23:52 in the video above).
It might seem like a trivial thing, but imagine if you could remember the exact moment mankind learned to use fire as a tool, or how to farm, or how to surf the net on the world’s first web browser? Imagine if you could remember where you were, and what you were doing, when a major cultural revolution happened?
News flash: it already has...
"The evolution of e-readers..." (Image via Wikipedia)
