Page 189 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015189a very innovative mix: it was the first public example of the use of technology in storytelling that involved the reader in a striking and totally new way.Along the same lines, in May 2013 The Guardian published “Firestorm”,26 a chronicle of the tragedy experienced by the Holmes family in Tasmania when their home and the village they lived in caught fire. The story was told in first person and, in comparison to “Snow Fall”, the dramatic tension is created more by the images and sound than by the text.And in April 2014, The Guardian published “The t-shirt on your back”,27 a touching story of yet another tragedy in Bangladesh in which more than 1,100 people died in a precarious factory that produced t-shirts and shirts for the western market. The use of sound is surprising, the images are very high quality and the inclu- sion of a few non-narrative elements reinforces the interactivity (for example, a counter calculates the money earned by the person who makes the t-shirts in Bangladesh compared to those who sell them in London) and the result is a story with a narrative tension that no other form of journalism had previously managed to create.The use of technology in storytelling involves the reader in a striking way and creates stories with powerful narrative tension.Although the results are extremely interesting from the point of view of the stories, we cannotspeak of new forms of sustainable journalism; production costs are very high and advertising revenues, although encouraging, are not yet sufficient to cover them.Other non-journalistic experiences based on the storytelling format have not fared so well: the New York firms Atavist Books28 and Byliner,29 despite a very encouraging start, have run into a considerable number of difficulties; the second was bought by the publishing platform Vook last year.30An interesting example of the use of an author’s fame to produce a content system is the TV series + book “How we got to now”31 and also the site “How we get to next”,32 based on the fame and authority of Steven Johnson, which deals with the subject of innovation in time.It is curious that in a hub for imaginary time the story that already happened should be told through traditional media while the story yet to be written is told through the press directly on the website.Another very interesting case is the Indian YourStory.33 The complexity, linguistic diversity and stratification of Indian society make it very difficult to create interest-based communitiesin the country. The apparently very simple idea that people’s stories told over the Internet (to which fewer than 20% of the Indian population have access – one of the lowest penetration rates in the world, though it is also one of the fastest growing) – can inspire other stories is provingto be very powerful. The Internet is innovation and the stories of business or social innovation that are told on the Internet show an elite with values who uphold and transmit a certain idea ofMarco Ferrario