Some thoughts inspired by the “Web as first platform” seminar and workshops held at YLE 14 – 16.12.2009.

A few days ago I had a sort of déjà vu when I took part in a workshop to develop the Lonnrot2017.fi webplatform led by Brett Gaylor. 25 years ago I was studying electronic and computer music in Utrecht. As it was common to the cutting edge musical scene of the era, music produced at our school was made both by musicians and non-musicians such as computing and sound ingeneers. I miss the intensive and fruitfull interaction between artists and scientists of those happy days in the Netherlands. The only thing that could spoil our joy was that - while we ourselves felt heroic with our hard earned sine waves - any outsider could tell us that his two-year-old daughter made more interesting music with her broken tambourine.

Now again, after 25 years, I found myself in an enthusiastic discussion side by side with hard core computing programmers about content and meaning, narrativity and interactivity, and aeshetic, moral, ethical and technical issues, without forgetting the themes specific to the web such as the social web, UGC, crowdsourcing and –funding, open source cinema, creative commons, long tail and etc.

Despite all the exitment about the new media it was obvious that the built-in web databases still tend to have a strong influence in the overall structure of mainstream interactive narratives. Rather than “a story on a web platform” - without making any qualitative judgements about the content - a web documentary is commonly a vast amount of interlinked text, illustrations, photos and videoclips organized in time (timelines and dates), space (maps), categories and subcategories.

Instead of focusing on single stories and “less is more” thinking, the webtalk presents missions measured in huge numbers and a set of rules to be followed: “1000 stories by 2017”, “300 stories & 19 days”, “4 teams & 12 countries”, “one night, 3x7 filmgroups & characters”, “20 cellphones & 5000 testimonies” and “2x40 stories & 2 cities”. Looking at numbers alone might be misleading: numbers are extracted from projects dealing with real humans and very important issues.

The seminar held at YLE collected the international crème de la crème of web documentary. Alexandre Brachet from Upian, the creative producer of some of the most innovative narrative on web, was concerned about the continuity of web documentaries and the intensity of viewing experience. Instead of trying to offer vast amounts of fragmented material to be freely explored, the Prison Valley web documentary aims to lock the viewers to their seats – just like in a traditional documentary - before they can proceed to the next “level” or an “interactive room” or open paths to the Real World.

Even though web documentaries have lots to offer, an occasional netsurfers average time spent experiencing even the best sites is measured in minutes. What is wrong? Perhaps current web documentaries try to offer too much too soon. If an audience feels that everything comes for free and anything is allowed, why should they commit themselves? There’s still much to learn from a Tamagotchi. The Prison Valley presents a fresh approach in an all-access non-linear web documentary world. It seems to be a project which conciously uses the teachings of a much mature form of art, the linear documentary. I believe this strategy of revarding the audience one step at a time could really work in gaining committed audiences.

The web offers a tempting third column for storytelling. Besides that a viewer can watch and listen to something within a close system, he has the option to create and modify content, communicate and be part of the story. All of these possibilities have been available for years and can be integrated in any single web documentary (depending on the budget).

Even though web documentaries have a great potential to combine the best storytelling traditions, gaming and some forms of human interaction, it is still very young as a standalone form of art. In order to attract prime time audiences and funding, many web documentaries are essentially cross media projects also broadcasted on TV.

The above-mentioned workshop held at YLE took a pragmatic approach in mingling the best of the two medias. It was agreed, that the team behind the “Story Tent presents” TV-series and the developers of the Lonnrot2017.fi website, led by Antti Haase, would collaborate to create a common spirit – sort of making a cross media brand. Both medias will attract audiences to each other’s platforms. It was also suggested that after the TV-series, the show would continue on-line on the Lonnrot2017.fi website for three hours with a live host receiving user generated stories in real time by skype or other means.

After the free flow of ideas about the design, functions, and usability of the Lonnrot2017.fi site, we had to face the hardest question: “How could we attract audiences to the site? And if they visit the site, how could we make them share with us their most precious story - not just crap”?

I think that what has to be done in the Real World, applies also to the Virtual World. In the Real World the Story Tent team invited each random passer-by to be their guest and contributor in a quest beyond one’s personal selfish interests. Each visitor was told face to face two magic words: YLE (something associated with non-profit, reliability and quality) and GIFT (something you give voluntarily to someone you appreciate and don’t expect anything in return). In this case the gift (your time, experience and wisdom) was to be given to a nation soon celebrating its 100 aniversary.

Would it be possible to build a site that could simulate a Real World situation? Could it collect user generated content as good as the content collected in the Real World tent? In its current state of development the Lonnrot2017.fi site is still a practical tool to present a few stories to anyone, anytime and for free. In order to collect 1000 stories and make it an easy tool for recording UGC by the year 2017 there is still much work to be done.

Last week this enormous task, which embraces the whole Finnish digital spectrum from content producers and institutions of applied sciences to flash programmers and commercial web technology providers, faced a major drawback. The European Social Fund refused funding for the long-awaited Digi-Lönnrot project which would have accelerated the leap to a new medium. A new application to the ESF will probably be made next April. Untill then, web technologies and new narrative practices will continue evolving in such a pace that probably I’m only telling yesterdays news.

Just for the sake of a mental exercise the Story Tent team came up with a first raw sketch for a Story site.

Benjamin Oroza, director