The Cult of Me

How Social Technologies Will Save the Story

Storytelling: Product Versus Process

During a discussion in my Social Media class at Northern Kentucky University, we veered onto a topic that is helpful in framing the idea of The Cult of Me: the difference between “product” and “process” storytellers.
The idea of the story as either a product or a process, I think, is instructive because it depending upon [...]

AEJMC Column: Coming in September

In the last few days, I’ve been exchanging Tweets with Mitch from the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) about the Associate Press decision to wrap its content in digital rights management.
This boneheaded decision set me off on one of my rants about history and technology, which got Mitch and I chatting. [...]

Clay Shirky: How Social Media Can Make History

This is a talk given by Clay Shirky, one of the leading voices discussion social media and storytelling.

Chapter 8: Catching Content

The idea of a distributed story is, like the product itself, emerging in various forms across the Web. There’s no one place — nor can there be one place — that encapsulates the idea. Instead it will manifest in many forms; however, there are some basic principles that are necessary for this type of emergent [...]

Chapter 8: Catching Content

The idea of a distributed story is, like the product itself, emerging in various forms across the Web. There’s no one place — nor can there be one place — that encapsulates the idea. Instead it will manifest in many forms; however, there are some basic principles that are necessary for this type of emergent [...]

Chapter 7: The Cult of Me

I’m tinkering with the chapter drafts right now. These are incomplete as the interviews and statistics that back up these arguments will come at the end. I want to make sure the narrative makes sense. This chapter is the first chapter of Part III, where I begin to detail exactly how this emerging Web-native story [...]

What’s in a Story (A Witty Response)

story
noun (pl. stories) 1 an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment. 2 an account of past events, experiences, etc. 3 an item of news. 4 a storyline. 5 informal a lie.
source Compact Oxford English Dictionary
My writing partner John asked me a question yesterday, one we started discussing in Berlin last [...]

The Role of Predictive Markets in Storytelling

In 2004, I took a position at MIT’s Technology Review, the nation’s oldest technology and science magazine published out of one of our countries most venerable institutions. My job: oversee the redevelopment of the magazine’s website from a simple placeholder for some of its articles into a fully-functional, modern news operation.
The site was a wreck, [...]

The Cult of Me: An Introduction to the Term

I’ve been sifting through the first few chapters of The Cult of Me, trying to lay the groundwork in the beginning of the book for the argument that comes later. I realized something in this process: I’ve talked about The Cult of Me without ever defining it. Really.
There are hints about it, but nothing concrete. [...]