A Confession and Some Thoughts on Modern Storytelling

    Okay, so I've got to come clean with all of you:  I'm a Lost fan.  I'm not ashamed -- my wife and I really enjoy deconstructing the show and we both enjoy the way the show paints its main characters -- but I feel like I should come clean. 
    Earlier today, I was catching up on some reading on my listservs, and I came across a thread asking about uses for Lost in the classroom.  I didn't have any specific ideas, but I did write the following because I got to thinking about some of what Lost is doing on television, and how that relates to other trends I'm noticing.  I'm curious to know what you think.

I've been struck by how Lost is moving off of television and onto the Internet and other places.  Several "mythology off the show" websites have sprung up that contain hidden secrets of the show.  Some links:

(The fictional airline of the show -- there are some interesting bits of text hidden in the code of this page.)
  (The group behind the mysterious hatch and the Dharma Initiative.)
  (This is a link to a novel purportedly written by someone who dies on the plane crash.  While the cover of the book features a Lost logo, the description on the Amazon page acknowledges the fiction that the author died in a fake plane crash.)

Now, I know that some of this stuff is just to create hype for the show and to sell a few more products, but I'm really intrigued by the idea of telling a story in several different media -- along the lines of how The Matrix involved comic books, anime, and video games in its storytelling. 

  As media get more and more complex, how should we be teaching the concept of "story?"  How do we trust a site like Amazon when they themselves play the game of the fictional story? 

A while back, some of my students interested me in the concept of Alternate Reality Games , fictional stories that reach out to real people via text messaging, late night phone calls, and a ton of other real interactions.  (I played one of the first, but I didn't know they were called such back when I started playing.)  Heck -- one author a while back wrote a book called A Treasure's Trove and hid more than a million dollars in real treasure all over the United States (There were clues in the book to help you discover the real treasure.  All but one of the treasure jewels have been found so far). 

  Is the nature of story telling changing, in some ways?    Or is this a bogus question, and has nothing really started to change?

  I don't have a clue about the answers -- but I find this stuff really, really interesting.  As a reader of textual and visual media, I am very captivated by some of these developments.  How can we help our students to both navigate these new environments -- and, more importantly, create their own?
 

Comments

[Ben]

My roomate in college played Majestic like a fiend. Of course, he wasn't interested much in actually playing the game (the phone calls in the middle of the night were a big pain), but he worked tirelessly to unravel the game, trying to poke holes in their story. He even went as far as to look through California phonebooks trying to disprove the addresses they had given in the game.

On a side note, I was reading a news article the other day about Geocaching. Basically it's the same thing as the hidden treasure, but you place another item in the location once you find the treasure. That way people can continue to play. Unfortunately, a road crew had found one hiding place (it was under a bridge)and had an anti-bomb squad team blow it up for fear that it was a bomb.

[Graham Wegner]

I recently posted about how when a story is told over time, the cultural re-mix but from a younger students' level using Dr. Seuss's The Cat In The Hat. They often don't realise how much of our text based culture references history or traditional stories - this is how shows like the Simpsons can engage the adults as much as the kids. Hey, my wife loves "Lost" too - unfortunately I rarely watch TV (too much online) but it does break the mould of cops, law and medical dramas that seem to be everywhere.