Register for the teleseminar here (you may need to become a member of Worldwide Story Work to register).

Or simply call this number on Sept. 9, 4 pm EDST: 1-218-936-4700 — Access Code 710691

For the past year interviewees on A Storied Career have shared their theories about why storytelling resonates now. Let’s discuss your speculations. Are we in fact in the Golden Age of Storytelling?

HQEssays.com is a leading provider of academic writing services. Do not hesitate, buy essay from our company and we from our side ensure the highest quality of the custom made paper delivered to you. The only thing you need to do is to provide us with detailed information about the requirements towards the essay or dissertation you need. You paper will be completed and sent to your email address on time.

Resume Writing : GrandResume.com is created to help in writing your resume, CV and cover letters. Our professional resume writers have written hundreds of them and ready assist in your job search.
Research Paper – MasterPapers is the online research paper writing service that creates custom research papers. This is research writing service for everyone who needs expert help.

For the past year in the Q&A series on my blog, A Storied Career, I have asked story practitioners: “The storytelling movement seems to be growing explosively. Why now? What is it about this moment in human history and culture that makes storytelling so resonant with so many people right now?” Here’s what they said:

• As a planet, we are in a place we never imagined and we yearn for comfort, understanding, reason, and most of all HOPE. Stories give us all of that and more, allowing us to reflect on the past, imagine the future, and accept the changes brought about by the challenges of today. — Susan Luke
• Families are spread across the country; we communicate via email, text messaging, and quick hellos as we pass in halls, shops, or even the home because of busy schedules. All very impersonal, yet as humans we crave and, according to some studies, thrive on contact and interaction with others. Stories connect us and ground us. — Carol Mon
• The implications of Web 2.0 and technological innovation on humankind are staggering. As I like to describe it, “the means of story production have become democratized”. … In a complex, interdependent world where worldviews and value systems collide, we naturally turn to storytelling as our most basic coping mechanism for making sense and meaning of everything around us. — Michael Margolis
• I think that our feelings of alienation from core human experiences arise from too much “virtual” reality and not enough real reality … Story reintroduces intimacy and emotions to communications between people. … The business interest in storytelling is riding this “crave wave” as well as a parallel realization that designing messages that create emotions like desire, craving, and/or trust toward a product requires that the message tells a story. — Annette Simmons
• Connections between people [have been] breaking down, and their souls [have been] suffering. I think people are hungry to rebuild this sense of connection, and we are doing this through the medium of stories, whether oral or written. — Sharon Lippincott
• The development of technologies like PowerPoint has inadvertently pushed the effort to bring back more stories. What seemed like a great communication tool has been overused and abused. — Carol Mon
• Savvy media gurus have come to realize that storytelling is the quickest and most relevant way to share information… everything is speeding up… In today’s faster paced time, storytelling is essential because captures the listener. — Annie Hart
• As storytelling is already deeply anchored into each of us, it’s a relatively low-cost solution to engage [in the] sense[-making] quest. — Stephane Dangel
• With the advent of so many electronic communications, people are just growing more aware of their need for deeper communication and connectedness. — Sean Buvala
• Now that we have such powerful communications tools, [storytelling] is still as important, but more massive that we can digest. So, we find those areas that we can relate to. — Katie Snapp
• It’s about finding ways to connect. — Whitney Quesenbery
• In our world of 24/7 news feeds, social media, etc., we are trying to drink from a firehose of information, and we’re finding ourselves bowled over yet still thirsty. … The storytelling movement is about restoring — “re-story-ing” if you will — a more authentic means of learning from each other and drawing meaning from our own experiences. — Sarah White
• The one thing that everyone can do regardless of where or how they work is create and tell stories. — David Vanadia
• • We’ve taken process improvement about as far as it can go. … it is time to seek new tools. And narrative is a perfect tool to help shed light on complex questions. — John Caddell
• People are inundated with information. … The very good leaders will help people make sense of the information, and story can help them do that. … [Gen Y] … really wants to be inspired, challenged, and motivated and again it is through story you can achieve this … — Gabrielle Dolan
• • Mostly I think the reason is the control people are exercising over selecting what information they spend their time with. There are more choices than ever before, people are busier with limited time, so why would they choose to spend that time on things that don’t meet their needs? The more personalized and relevant information is to the person presented with it, the more engagement is possible. Storytelling is in our genes. — Ardath Albee
• Story has the wonderful ability to capture [the] great complexity [of 21st century life] into a simple form, allowing listeners to take in the concepts, ideas, challenges, without feeling overwhelmed. … One could also say that story resonates because there has been a confluence of authors (Annette Simmons, Steve Denning, Rick Stone) and others (Karen Dietz, Seth Kahan, Victoria Ward) who have begun to articulate the power of story, offering ways and means of using story. — Madelyn Blair
• Leaders are looking for new ways to understand what’s really happening in their organization. They are looking for better ways to engage and better ways motivate people. Stories are integral to the new ways of working in complex environments. — Shawn Callahan
• Given the unfathomable sea of information afforded us through the Internet, storytelling is an invaluable resource as it provides the means for delivering substance and meaning in a form that can be readily grasped by the masses. — Jon Hansen
• I remember sitting in a class and hearing Dr. Joseph Sobol say, “Anthropologists say storytellers arise when the society has lost its way.” Wow, that resonated in every part of my body. — Molly Catron

Please think about these questions. We probably won’t have time to discuss all of them. Which ones interest you most, and what other questions do you have?

• Are we, in fact, in a Golden Age of Storytelling?
• Or are we, as story practitioners and “fans” just much more attuned to storytelling than others are?
• For those who’ve been involved in storytelling for a significant period — do you feel that you are hearing more now about storytelling then you were a few years ago?
• Can you identify any single event, publication, person, etc., that seemed to trigger greater interest in storytelling?
• Do you hear more about people who are starting story-related businesses/practices?
• Could the perceived explosion in storytelling be because people are more broadly (too broadly?) defining “storytelling?”
• In April, I asked the question referenced above in a different way: “Are we in the Golden Age of Storytelling? Why or why not?” The respondents answered that we are not (yet) in a golden age — or we don’t yet know if we are (see http://astoriedcareer.com/2009/04/survey-says-were-not-in-the-go.html). The comment that most struck me was from Michael Margolis: “To debate when we might enter a so-called ‘golden age,’ is just another attempt to separate and fragment ourselves from the wholeness that already exists, if we just open our eyes to it. Instead of waiting for some moment to arrive, why not step into that larger story right now?” Your thoughts?
• To what extent do you think social media contributes to an explosion in storytelling?

Education Resources –

College Term Paper – Want to submit a college term paper that not only gets you good grades but also impresses your teachers? Then, leave this task to well-educated and experience professionals at masterpapers.com. At this website, you can order term papers, essays and all kinds of coursework material. Their expert writers write well-researched material for you.

Research Papers – Losing your mind with the burden of coursework? Stop worrying and hire essaycapital.com to ensure that you meet every deadline well in time. They write well researched term papers, research papers, essays etc. and make sure that you get good grades and reputation in the class.

Custom Thesis – Dissertations or thesis are one of the most important documents in any student’s life. As a lot depends on the quality of dissertation, it is important to trust an expert like ma-dissertations.com to write your custom dissertation. They are experts in writing well researched academic material at affordable prices.

Essay Writing – Worried about writing essay for your class? Can’t decide where to start or how to write it? Stop worrying and hire bestessay4u.com. They can create original, comprehensive and well written coursework materials for you.

Dissertation Writing – Need help with your class writing tasks? When it comes to your studies, always trust the best. Dissertation-service.co.uk helps people like you in their dissertation writing by providing well researched and well-written material by experts.

Coursework – Want to hire a coursework writing service, but can’t decide which one’s the best? Let us help you decide. Coursework-writing.co.uk provides the best writing services, along with polite online support that helps you get the perfect coursework material.

Buy Essay Online – Valwriting.com is a well-known name in the world of academic writing. Their affordable prices and experienced staff have given them a special status in this field.

Buy Research Paper – The one thing that every student dreads is a bad review on his or her coursework writing. If you want to make sure that you only get positive and appreciating remarks, then buy research papers, term papers, book reports etc. from Researchpaperwriter.net

Custom Research Papers – Most students feel incredibly stressed about writing term papers, reports etc. If you need help in completing and improving your coursework material then hire Samedayessay.com. They provide custom research papers, book reports, essays and all the other kinds of academic material.

See a photo of Paul and John, their bios, Part 1 of this Q&A,Part 2, and Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

Q&A with Paul Furiga and John Durante, Questions 11 and 12:

Q: Are there any current uses of storytelling that repel you or that you feel are inappropriate?

A: There are examples everywhere of inauthentic stories being told to influence or mislead (this remains a significant and well-paid endeavor in the marketing profession, sadly) and we believe that for most businesses, such an approach is dangerous. True storytelling is not direct selling or promotion. It is honest, open dialogue about products or services that helps frame an audience’s understanding and response. For these reasons we’ve always thought it was essential to make stories authentic. God bless Seth Godin and his followers, but it strikes us as inherently dishonest to write a book that’s called All Marketers Are Liars and then twist that title with another bit of misdirection late in the book to say that marketers aren’t really liars at all, but that consumers are huge liars and that they lie to themselves all the time — and that marketers are only honestly repeating the lies that consumers tell themselves when buying clothes or cars. So who then, is the real liar in that scenario? It’s hard to judge but not hard to understand that praising lying is praising the telling of inauthentic stories. We’re not at all suggesting that when a client or company tells a marketing story that they shouldn’t tell it in a way that makes them sound good. It just means that, if the audience wants to check it out (and today, with the Internet community, they can), it better be rooted in fact and told in a way that’s authentic.

Q: What future aspirations do you have for you own story work? What would you like to do in the story world that you haven’t yet done?

A: At WordWrite, we continue to see long-term promise in storytelling. To a certain degree, when and how this unfolds is linked to where global society is headed with social media and at what pace. At some point, storytelling as we are discussing it here and the current use of social media are going to fuse in a way that, we believe, will require the classical tenets of storytelling, though altered by the delivery capabilities (and limitations) of social media tools. While we can’t predict how it all turns out, we feel deep within our bones that storytelling will be an essential element of success for organizations seeking to thrive in a digital era. “What does it all mean to me?” is a question we hear often. There is no substitute for a strong story in delivering an answer.

This thinking has fueled our development of StoryCraftingSM — WordWrite’s proprietary method of building an authentic storytelling platform for clients based on the fundamentals of their day-to-day business. We are very high on StoryCrafting as markets shift toward a greater demand for truly authentic communication (not merely “inauthentic authenticity”).

See a photo of Paul and John, their bios, Part 1 of this Q&A,Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.

Q&A with Paul Furiga and John Durante, Questions 13 and 14:

Q: What’s your favorite story about a transformation that came through a story or storytelling act?

A: The Southwest Airlines story is truly a story — in so many ways. One of the great successes of the company, in our view, is that it has successfully told many stories that reflect its evolution as a start-up airline that its powerful and heavily regulated competitors tried to strangle at birth. Many people know, for example, that the airline’s stock symbol is LUV. Like so much else in Southwest’s history, there’s a real story behind that. Early on, competitors trying to kill Southwest arranged sweetheart legislation that forced Southwest to fly out of Dallas Love Field, and not the much bigger (and better-connected) Dallas-Forth Worth airport. As a symbol of its spunk and its story, when Southwest not only beat the odds and its competitors to become a public company, it took LUV as its stock symbol, a symbolic storyline nod to its roots at Love Field. We could give you many more Southwest examples, but you probably get the point.

Q: If you could share just one piece of storytelling with readers what would it be?

A: Current uses of social media have focused largely on the wizardry of content distribution and redistribution. But comparatively little attention has been placed on the authenticity of content or the credibility of the storyteller within the social media realm. This is dangerous and social media users, in our view, need to begin to incorporate these points into their use of that media. The flip side of this caution is that this is where the opportunity lies in this digital era — employing storytelling in new ways that take social media to new heights, and storytelling to new success.

See a photo of Paul and John, their bios, Part 1 of this Q&A,Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.

Q&A with Paul Furiga and John Durante, Questions 15, 16, and 17:

Q: Paul, you write in a blog entry that you are an entrepreneur partly because of your family. Some entrepreneurs might find that statement surprising because business owners often find they have less time with their families than before. How are you able to find that balance?

A: Several thoughts are relevant here. Obviously, a big one is that the mobility in information technology that allows us to do many parts of our work in non-conventional environments. Another is that my spouse and I both work at WordWrite and so I guess less collective time is spent on “downloading” the day’s business to one another.

But perhaps an even bigger point is how being a small business owner is changing. Small business ownership has been perceived as very high risk because the entrepreneur forsakes the relative security of an organizational job. I worked in many organizational jobs for a lot of years. In one of them, I actually became in expert in the communications surrounding mass layoffs. I was on-site one year for more than 5,000 layoffs. I learned then what many people are just learning now — that there is actually less “security” in being part of an organization than in writing your own story as an entrepreneur. Thus, the issues of family balance are not substantially different, and in many cases are actually easier. I can afford to be more flexible when it comes to family. Yes, like any small business owner, I burn my share of the midnight oil and occasionally am on the iPhone while attending a family function, but for us the balance issue has come pretty naturally.

Q: John, you wrote a blog entry recently about how Carl Jung recognized the importance of stories. Have you always brought Jungian psychology into your storytelling work or were theories about storytelling a more recent discovery?

A: Since my graduate school days I have always been familiar with Jungian psychology but it wasn’t until Paul invited me in to collaborate on our current project that I began to make the link. Over the years Paul have clearly remained passionate about the importance of storytelling so I started to mesh some of his sustaining ideas with some of older ideas I might have once known. That’s when the Jungian connection about the “collective unconscious” became obvious.

Q: Does the current state of the economy create a greater need for businesses to tell a great story? Does the economy change the way businesses should tell their stories?

A: Yes. And because of the economic collapse, and the lies it exposed, the stories, more than ever before, must be authentic. Consider just one aspect, the collapse of residential real estate. One way of looking at it is that too many people fell in love with inauthentic story approaches to supercharge consumer activity. I mean how else do you explain a household with a $40,000 annual income qualifying for a $400,000 mortgage?

This experience should prove to businesses that we must avoid these types of inauthentic stories. The experience also makes clear that we, as a society, must leverage authenticity to help rebuild communications credibility across vast sectors of global business. The professional storytellers who let their narratives spiral into a swamp of inauthenticity in the first place have much to explain. The retribution, thanks to the independent voice that electronic communication provides, is more swift and powerful today. Without an authentic response to the anger and venom of those complaining on Twitter or blogs or web sites, the price of telling an inauthentic story is even deeper.

• cross-media storytelling
• transmedia storytelling
• immersive storytelling
• distributed storytelling

As I read about these terms, they all seem to be talking about roughly the same thing. I figured if anyone knew about the nuances of difference among the terms, it would be Christy Dena, who has focused her doctoral studies on what she describes as “a new form of storytelling & gaming” (which, I believe, she is currently calling “cross-platform” storytelling).

Indeed, she does offer an answer, and my puny list above, it turns out, is just the tip of the iceberg. Christy provides a lengthy list of terms that she states are either the equivalent or sub-sets of cross-media.

I don’t want to steal her thunder by repeating the whole list — and I also tend to shun those that directly reference games because I’m just not into games — so here’s a very abbreviated version of her list (in addition to those at the top of this entry):

• Convergent Storytelling
• Distributed Narratives
• Intermedia Storytelling
• Mobile Narratives
• Multimedia Stories
• Multi-Platform Storytelling
• Polymorphic Fictions
• Situated Narratives
• Synergistic Storyscapes
• Synergistic Storytelling

I find these genres fascinating and keep wondering what applications they may have beyond what we’ve already seen. But before I get into that, it’s useful to come up with some sort of definition and basic understanding.

Henry Jenkins, who champions the term “transmedia storytelling,” offers a good explanation in the video I embedded here. Jenkins also offers a good definition, explanation, and copious resources in the Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment Syllabus for the course he’s teaching this fall at USC, which he posted on his blog:

We now live at a moment where every story, image, brand, relationship plays itself out across the maximum number of media platforms, shaped top down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenager’s bedrooms. The concentrated ownership of media conglomerates increases the desirability of properties that can exploit “synergies” between different parts of the medium system and “maximize touch-points” with different niches of consumers. The result has been the push towards franchise-building in general and transmedia entertainment in particular.

A transmedia story represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from television into comics, the web, computer or alternate reality games, toys and other commodities, and so forth, picking up new consumers as it goes and allowing the most dedicated fans to drill deeper. The fans, in turn, may translate their interests in the franchise into concordances and wikipedia entries, fan fiction, vids, fan films, cosplay, game mods, and a range of other participatory practices that further extend the story world in new directions. Both the commercial and grassroots expansion of narrative universes contribute to a new mode of storytelling, one which is based on an encyclopedic expanse of information which gets put together differently by each individual consumer as well as processed collectively by social networks and online knowledge communities.

The Blair Witch Project and The Matrix are often cited as seminal examples that spawned transmedia storytelling. And just as an aside, a wonderful piece from five years ago — a great story of storytelling — is Exocog: A case study of a new genre in storytelling (back when transmedia/cross-media/immersive storytelling was indeed a new genre) about a transmedia project undertaken independently of a film studio — yet as an extension of the film Minority Report. The project was something like what Jenkins calls a “grassroots extension,” except that the organizers were not “fans” per se. Jim Miller, who wrote the piece, cites the old Apple HyperCard program as one of the earliest roots of using computers and the Internet for storytelling. I never grasped HyperCard yet thought it was cool.

Given that I’m not into games and that storytelling in movies and TV is also not at the top of my list of interests (mostly because other writers/bloggers have those genres well covered), I’m interested in other applications that transmedia/cross-media/immersive storytelling may have. Can they be used for nonfiction stories and for individuals (say, in job-hunting and personal branding)?

John Thompson, senior copywriter at One to One Interactive, answers the nonfiction question when he cites “one of the most successful social media-enabled stories going — the Obama presidency.”

Emerging multimedia journalism also is applying transmedia/cross-media/immersive storytelling to nonfiction. With regard to the way the aftermath of the Iran elections was covered through social media, Brad King writes:

… in this distributed world, the best storytellers should be out there aggregating all the information, creating pages where the information can be pulled, mapped and searched in a variety of manners; where information can be set up top by users; and then knowledgeable folks can provide their own context to what is happening.

(King is concerned both with the way this kind of storytelling should be archived and the perils of “remixing” storytelling that result in incidents such as Maureen Dowd’s failure to attribute a paragraph in her column to its rightful source.

And Kfir Pravda flirts with the individual question by writing:

Immersive storytelling is the use of social web and online video to tell a linear fictional story, through the social activities of the characters. … but what about the stories that happen to people around us? People in real life? Did you ever read someone’s Facebook status messages and learned about his personal stories through it? Did you ever read personal blogs and vlogs and felt that you are witnessing a real life story? This is the basic concept of immersive storytelling — the movie theater is replaced by Facebook and Twitter profiles, blogs, and personal vblogs.

So, we can probably say that some people are heavily involved in transmedia/cross-media/immersive storytelling by having personal Web sites, blogs, videos of themselves of YouTube, photos on Flickr, profiles on Facebook and Twitter, and so on. Various feeds, lifestreams, and storystreams are likely a good way for these various media to tell the individual’s story cohesively. For functions like personal branding and job-seeking, a certain degree of linearity is probably desirable.

And perhaps a degree of interaction is desirable. I’ve written before about Kevin Sablan, whose “storystreaming” vision focuses on how others interact with the story’s protagonist: “every story includes multiple characters, events and plot. A storystream platform needs to document a the events of a story, not a person.”

Although “Johnny Blank” (“a storyteller hell bent on discovering ways to harness emerging technologies to share stories with new audiences”) writes in the context of film and blurring the lines between filmmaker and audience, his words apply to those interested in telling — and participating in — nonfiction and individual stories acorss platforms:

For the first time since ancient cultures, where stories were passed down from generation to generation through verbal communication (around fires etc), the world has now found a new, communal space to share and grow its stories that represent humanity. … In other words, stories are no longer simply stories, they are world views that will evolve with discussion, creation, and review.

I’m not quite going to make that target date. I’m putting finishing touches on the book, proofing, and editing. I do expect to send out a beta release to contributors this week.

But the actual release looks to be the middle of next week. Thanks for your patience.

href="mailto:kathy@astoriedcareer.com?Subject=Notify_Me_When_EBook_Is_Ready">Click here to e-mail me style="color: rgb(0, 102, 102);"> to be notified when the book is
ready for free download.

Last week, a Twitterer sang the storytelling praises of this presentation from Waterlife about dwindling water resources and the fact that water is now polluted with pharmaceutical toxins.

I will grant that this is beautifully done presentation. But I don’t see it as much beyond a very technically advanced PowerPoint presentation with facts and figures.

I don’t see it as storytelling. Do you?

The Tweeter referred to the presentation as “Database Storytelling,” which was a new one on me. I Googled the term, looked it up on Wikipedia, and asked the Tweeter for a definition but could not learn what “database storytelling” is. Do you know what database storytelling is? If so, please share.

I was similarly flummoxed by this piece, also touted in the Twitterverse as storytelling. At first I saw it as a poem, but later I realized it’s apparently some sort of game, an “unidentified game object.” I couldn’t get too far into it because the music drove me insane (I suppose I could have turned off the sound). OK, I can sort of see the game aspect, but can someone explain the storytelling to me?

Alexandre Gueniot explains that he created his animated, musical resume in 2004, had a huge response from it, and accepted a job at Microsoft as a result of it. I suspect the words fit the music better in Gueniot’s native French (and the French version also is available), but it’s really well done and shows a great sense of humor. It’s certainly one prototype of a “story” resume. It’s unquestionably a resume that tells a story.

Here’s another one of a different ilk that equally shows a great sense of humor.

Even in this blog’s first year, 2005, an article I cited by, Penelope Trunk was two years old. But its storied advice about networking — telling your story when you meet someone new still hold up six years after Penelope wrote it. In fact, as I wrote about here, Marcos Salazar gave much the same advice just a month or so ago:

“When someone asks ‘What do you do?’ a one-word answer will put your career on ice. You need to have a story. When you want to establish a connection with someone, a story provides social glue.

“When you want to impress someone, a story is more memorable than a list of achievements.”

She goes on to tell a great story of the story she told in a successful job interview.

You can RSVP and see more info here on Facebook. Looks like you need to friend Cathie on Facebook or follow her on Twitter to participate.

Here’s how she describes it:

This is an experiment I want to do with all my contacts on Facebook and Twitter. I am creating a storytelling Twitterthon. It will be all day Monday. Since most of you are off of work, maybe you can stop by tweet on twitter and tell us a short story about yourself.

This is how it works. Put in the hash tag before your tweet : #TOJStory and then with the rest of the 140 characters share one story, or a number of stories about yourself.

For those who take part in the twitterthon, I will be printing all the replies on my website next week. I will post the link in my group. You can also read the stories submitted by searching the hash tag on Twitter

For those unfamiliar with hash tags just remember that before you write in the twitter box, you write #TOJStory to be considered part of the Twitterthon.

Cathie Dodd AKA twitter name: @Tearsofjoy