The Cult of Me

How Social Technologies Will Save the 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 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. [...]

Archiving the Distributed Story: I Have No Idea

My buddy Glenn Platt, a professor and program director at Miami (OH) University, and I were chatting the other day about distributed stories.
I feel confident that I know what a distributed story is, how you build a network to tell those stories and some tools you might use that don’t seem obvious.
More importantly, he asked [...]

Distributed Storytelling: Why You Need a Predictive Market

I just had a long conversation with Sophia B. Liu, a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who is — and I will bastardize the heck out of this — working on a thesis about how to build tools to allow for distributed story and archiving of events.
I know I’ve not accurately [...]

3 Steps to Building a Distributed News Organization

I was talking with Glenn Platt, the director of the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami (Oxford) University, about what a distributed news organization would look like today. He’s intrigued by my ideas and asked me a simple question: so what does this (functionally) look like.
Sans drawing paper, I couldn’t show him. But [...]

On Language + Knowledge

I was having a discussion with one of the Computer Scientists from Northern Kentucky University about the convergence of communication and programming.
We were discussing my decision to leave NKU and take a position at Ball State University, and reflecting on the one class we team-taught (actually, she taught it; I was a guest lecturer once [...]

What Iran Is Teaching Us About Distributed Storytelling

For some time, I’ve had this sense that the ways in which we have been discussing “interactivity” when it comes to storytelling has been wrong.
In this little thought exercise, interactivity is short for anything that requires users to engage in some action, but an action that is limited by the tools provided by the storytellers. [...]

A Brief History of the Future of the Story

I’ve spent the last 16 hours discussing the future of the story. Not non-fiction versus fiction versus conversation. The future of how we tell, distribute, share, interact with, the effects of and the dangers of stories.
It’s been amazing and I’ll be posting thoughts from my interview with Penguin Books, Six to Start and a host [...]

Why Interactive is a Very Bad Way Tell a News Story…

I’ve been contemplating a thought I had today during the final session of the b.tween conference here in Liverpool: there are two “types” of Web-centric stories, distributed and interactive.
The news business is working with interactive stories, which is a bad idea since it’s limiting and mainly used for branding purposes or tradition-type entertainment; distributed stories [...]

7 Rules for the Interactive Story

I’ve been talking to folks, formally and informally, during this conference. I wish I had my feet a bit more grounded, but I don’t. Still Katz has done a great job organizing this so there is lots to be done.
Here’s my takeaway so far on storytelling:

The platform is the game-changer here insomuch as the tools [...]

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