"Many parents [...] have undoubtedly learned to recognize the look of young
eyes glazing over at the first hint of a long-winded explanation of some
principle. Better a story that demonstrates the spiritual and human qualities
we wish to transmit to young people."Hillary Rodham Clinton, It Takes a Village, p. 177
"Recently, Roger Schank and Robert Abelson published a summary article,
'Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story.' This article [argues] that
knowledge and story are inextricably connected, and that stories are partial,
structured memories of observed and articulated reality."Glorianna Davenport/MIT Media Lab, "Smarter Tools for Storytelling:
Are They Just Around the Corner?" IEEE Multimedia, Spring 1996, p. 10.
First, A Story
Once upon a time, there were three bears. The youngest bear was in sales, the middle-aged bear was an academic and the oldest bear was a storyteller. They all had World Wide Web sites on the Internet. One day, a little girl named Goldilocks surfed up to the youngest bear's site which had lots of fancy animated graphics. "Oh, this is too hot!" she said. Next, she surfed over to the middle aged bear's site which had a scholarly paper on the impact of providing online services to developing countries. "Oh, this is too cool!" she said. Finally, she surfed over to the oldest bear's site which had a story about some porridge, some chairs and some beds in a cottage in the woods. "Oh, this is just right!" she said and she set a bookmark and emailed the URL to her friends, Hansel and Gretel.
The next day the three bears got together to compare their server access logs. "Someone has been visiting my site!" the youngest bear said, "but they never made it past my first 1.2 megabyte graphic."
"Someone has been visiting my site, too!" the middle-aged bear said, "but they never made it past the abstract of my paper."
"Lots of people have been visiting my site, as well," said the oldest bear, "and it looks like they go all the way through it to find out what happens in the end."
"Do you have statistical proof?" asked the middle-aged bear.
"There's no way," said the youngest bear. "Those old stories put people to sleep!"
"Well, that may be," the oldest bear said, "but when people wake up the next day, they remember and repeat the stories to one another."
"You mean, like, actually telling the stories to each other in conversation?" the youngest bear asked.
"Believe it or not, research shows people do have social lives beyond the Net," the middle-aged bear said.
"But that's what makes the Web so great," the oldest bear said. "Stories can be shared by everyone around the world—even us bears!"
Web Stories
Suppose that Web pages are the next evolutionary step in the development of language. How do they contribute to our fitness, to our ability to survive in a hostile environment, to the preservation and improvement of society? I believe the answer is apparent from the historical importance of literary works. Web pages can convey lessons in the form of stories.
Why Stories?
Stories teach by example, providing a bridge from entirely abstract expressions of concepts to some familiar reality. For example, my five-year-old daughter cannot calculate three minus two, but she can think her way through a problem such as, "If you had three cookies and you ate two of them, how many would you have left?"
Creating stories is a critical step in the process of science. You can just imagine the cosmologists asking, "Once upon a time there was a Big Bang, then what?" Web pages containing such stories go a long way toward demystifying science. "My experience of controlling a computer [...] taught me that knowledge was not a finite entity served in watered down doses by an elite class of a few brilliant scholars and scientists who understood it all [...]," Joseph South relates in his story of discovering computers as a fourth grader. The Ligature Gateway Academy, an innovative program using the Web in grade school education, has students write stories about subjects they study, such as Storms. Or look at the Project Narratives from 158 schools from 22 countries who completed entries for the International Schools CyberFair.
Most important of all, stories involve and engage people. So stories on the Web connect technology to community. Researchers studying Human Computer Interaction are collecting A Web Storybase. The National School Network Testbed invites stories from Testbed members about their school/community partnerships. The best 15 stories will be awarded $500. And there is a growing collection of other Story Resources available on the Web.
Check out David Rothman's NetWorld!: What People Are Really Doing on the Internet, and What It Means to You or, for news stories, try NewsLink, a listing of over 3,000 online newspapers.
At The Giraffe Project—people who stick their necks out for the common good—you will find profiles of real-life heroes, while Mythtext has Mythology from All Over The World. Electronic Darpan has stories just about India.
The Net is for Everyone
Once you have surfed around, if you have a story to tell, make your own Web page and tell it! Visit the USENET newsgroup alt.arts.storytelling for help. Tell them Goldilocks sent you.