Researching into Audience Participation and Authorship

In my module, Applied Media Research, myself, Kristy Markey and Ian Gardener were tasked with researching a topic provided to us by Digital Fiction Factory, which was:

The Internet, social media and other open systems have allowed for usergenerated content (UGC), crowd-sourcing and other forms of audience participation to prevail in          digital media. But how do we translate thesefeatures into storytelling experiences, without treading on the toes of the author?

In short, we needed to find a balance between users creating and sharing their own stories, while leaving control over the author.

I will admit that I took the side of the audience in this topic, I greatly support user generated content. Fan Fiction can generally tell interesting stories and show layers to a character that have never been seen before, such as when Helen Klein Ross started tweeting as Betty from the popular series Mad Men. She used little tweets to show the character more depth that was further explored in the show. (Rose, 2011, p.80-81)

The audience will always tell more stories they love, because that is the way humanity lives. As Frank Rose (2011, p.97) states:

"People tell and retell stories they love because thats what human's do."

So from this we looked into different case studies. Ian and Kirsty looked into a number of cases, such as Dan 3.0 and Life in a Day. While I felt the best way to know how to create interactive fiction is video games. Video games have been telling interactive stories for many years, coming out with amazing narrative experiences such as Heavy Rain and Mass Effect.

Though video games have been successful in this area, there was no answer in how to use this structure in other narrative experiences. It was only when I began to question the level of an audience's involvement that I came across a question. Is storytelling not a game in itself. 

Surely this is how storytelling really took off, when a group sits together and asks who can tell the best story. This is a game that we have been playing for generations. In fact one could argue that the Oscar's is a game, where people choose and award the best visual story of that year. The Oscars is a competition, it is a game.

When Ross wrote as Betty, she used her past experience as a advertising secretary and started to read 1960's cookery books to get into character. (Rose, 2011, p.80-81) Was she writing a story and a character or was she role playing, a popular game in our childhood.




So I felt that audiences did not want the power of an author, to change the story and characters, they simply wished to play the game and create their own stories. To test this, I created some Questionnaires, asking participants to choose their favourite fictional world, describe their character in that world, draw the character and to decide how much influence did this character have to the main story.



One person wanted to change some elements, such as saving a character from death and other matters. One did not wish to be a character and simply enjoyed the story. 

However the majority stated that they would rather exist in the fictional world and have their own stories. This pretty much solved the problem, there is no issue. People want to be just as creative and take part in the story world, but they respect the author's story and will not change it.

With this final conclusion, we created a prezi presentation that can be seen here. We presented to our lecturers and left the class. I felt like the presentation went well, we put on a good show and I felt like our lecturers enjoyed the theme of our prezi, which as telling a story about our researching adventure. I think if we were better organised, we would have done more research and experiments, trying to further prove our claim that storytelling is a game.

Still this is not the end. We now have to each write a 3000 word report on our research, showing more case studies and experiments to create an argument on the topic. So this blog will continue, despite my lack of writing. I will write any more thoughts on the topic and create posts on different case studies I came across, such as Alice and Kev, and OMRPG's.

So thats all, hopefully I can blog some more later.



Bibliography 

Rose, F. (2011) The Art of Immersion. London, W. W. Norton Company

The Developments of Digital Technology has Democratised the Film Industry

We are pretty much a practical course, but seeing as the name is Media Professional Studies, there are moments where we do have to study media. One of our lectures is Digital Media Cultures, which is basically about how Digital Media is affecting culture......or how culture is affecting digital media.....its bit of an egg and chicken question that statement.

But its a good module, I never enjoyed theory, but this lecture really got me interested in what media actually does to the world and what may happen next in media. Still after weeks of note taking and powerpoint slides, it was time to write an essay. I decided to write about how developments in digital technology democratised the film industry. Basically I was going to talk about how DSLRs, the internet and crowd funding help consumers become filmmakers, and how we will see more independent films that are funded by fans and consumers.

It was one of the few essays I enjoyed writing, as its a topic I am quite passionate about. Every point I made I thought of how it could be amy soon-to-be career in this field. I ended up using quite a lot of research, but I always see more books, articles and websites that could benefit my essay, leaving me wondering if there was a way to use this topic as my dissertation for third year.

Still this was not the only research I am required to work on for university, my other piece of research is also something I am really interested in.