Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Storycorps: Populist Digital Storytellers

Storycorps is an organization that interviews everyday folk from across America and turns their conversations, anecdotes, and lives into digital stories. Not all of the stories are animated -- many remain as just audio files -- but they are all fascinating. Everyone has a story to tell and Storycorps is honoring that.

Oral traditions were said to have died or been dying by critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin nearly a century ago in his essay The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov. Benjamin wrote extensively about the positive and negative effects of technology on various arts and is worth reading to this day, but I digress. While to him it may have looked like oral storytelling was dying in the 20th century due to newspapers, radio, and television, it seems today as if technology is taking us full circle with storytelling growing again with the help of the internet and new audio technologies that make recording and editing much easier and cheaper.

Back to Storycorps: here's an animated short wherein a WWII vet recalls the Battle of the Bulge.

No comments:

Post a Comment