The web explodes the bindings, not the stories
I recently found myself defending Multiplatform (see the web) as a medium for unique content in contrast to television. 'What's the point of it?' was the central argument. 'It's bullshit.'
Now, I'm not saying there's not a river-load of stink running through the online landscape; there's a lot of crap out there, much of it amateur UGC, but a fair portion also content created by 'professionals' in the media who haven't grasped the concept of this new medium as being more than a conduit for the old medium and the old message, and, by that measure, a second rate one full of second rate ideas.
True - the narrative styles of old media may look underwhelming online, and many of the attached apps, factoid pages, 'extra clips' and half-arsed social media / games are as useful as a wooden barbeque, but that's missing the point.
"For those viewers watching in black and white, the pink ball is just behind the green." - Ted Lowe (Snooker commentator)
Stop looking at the web and internet as a place where the old story doesn't work as well and has to be clumsily apologised for. Criticisms and complaints, while 'valid enough' when using old paradigms and models as the basis for the criticism, are entirely off the mark. You're trying to tell the time with a sliderule and getting cross when you miss your train.
Instead of thinking about how the content you've been making for the last 60 years doesn't quite fit the NEW platform and getting frustrated with trying to make it work, try thinking about how you can be creating NEW types of content that does work online, that's meant to be online.
The web is not made for television. Despite what the iPlayer would have you believe. The iPlayer is changing the way we consume television - schedules are dead - I give it ten years before on demand has killed the old model of drip-fed, dictated-release content. But the iPlayer is not (yet) creating new content for a new medium.
Multiplatform has constraints, yes. Especially for the previous models of content. But it has so many opportunities for story-telling, for interactivity, for extended, exploratory, free narrative journeys.
Have a look at the recent Penguin Books project http://wetellstories.co.uk/ - particularly The Former General - six original stories (narratives) commissioned to create interactive story experiences. Some are more successful than others, but the Former General tale works particularly well - the nuances of shifting detail and prose depending on the direction of travel - elements of shifting memory, truths and unreliable recollection... An effective and original approach. Ostensibly placing an old medium (novels / short stories) into the new medium of the web. But again: not really.
I'm drawn to consider the act of placing the collective narrative of oral tradition into one volume of The Odyssey under the nom de plume Homer and binding it. That process immediately created a new offering - consistent content - a definitive narrative to be consumed and transmitted in a new way. The orally transmitted Odyssey likely travelled and continued to evolve with embellishment, slights of memory and confusions - the original mash-up. Constantly evolving content immediately divergent from its sister in print.
This is what the web does: it explodes the bindings; the web returns us to a more oral tradition model of content creation and re-telling. The internet and web have already comprehensively exploded the 'bindings' of the music industry's album model (only a relatively recent model in and of itself) - it will also explode the binding of 'recent' narrative forms.
I'm not saying that's going to be the new bowl of soup for everyone. It's not. TV and authored narrative from experienced story-tellers will remain a valued commodity. But now there's a new way you can try too. It's early days. It's only 20 years old fer christsakes. Give it time to grow up, for the people who've grown up with it to find their voices, their way of telling stories in a new way, of communicating ideas on a different platform... It's going to be great.
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Anyway - some content for you. I originally wanted to just post these two films that take the Occam's Razor of shortform video to the subject of life. The first is more obviously artistic - it's a fiction, it's a narrative; entirely experiential; a life flashback. Not unique in concept, but beautifully done. Tell me where this would sit on Television...
This second piece is an older film (you may well have seen it before), a simple portrait study by a guy who took a photo of himself every day in the same passport photo format for eight years, then put them all together to a ferocious soundtrack. A friend of mine said of this: "You can almost feel the wind rushing through your hair as you watch it!"
Again - its an art piece, not a narrative in any sense other than it charts the passing of time in a very visual way. Again - where would it sit on television? Some might question its worth (it works for over a million people online).
Whatever you think, let's not write off Multiplatform as a waste of time and money just yet, eh?
Keep th' faith,
Article Dan
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