digital mish-mash

My 1^st-grade son is learning how to read. If he can’t sound out a word, he guesses based on the pictures. He still “reads” by pictures, taking them in first. I do the opposite, reading the words first and sometimes not even noticing the pictures.

Of course, the way my son reads a story is a reflection of where he is developmentally. But it wasn’t surprising to see in the article on the Nielsen study that kids are such rabid consumers of online video. Even after they begin to read, many kids find picture-based stories–whether it be videos or video games–to be compelling in a way that text alone isn’t. As Marie-Laure Ryan says, an image doesn’t tell a story; it evokes it.  It’s a more immediate and powerful experience.

For kids growing up with the Web, the book will no longer be the standard-bearer of how stories are told. That generation is internalizing new ways of assimilating information. A website does not have the cohesiveness or narrativity of a book. In fact, it’s anti-narrative. A website like Webkinz is designed so kids want to look everywhere at once. Images compete for their attention. Without a prescribed order for exploring, kids make sense of things however they choose.

Even content on the Web that is intentionally narrative, like a blog or a video, is not necessarily experienced that way. You can jump in or get out at any point–or, with a video, mash it up to tell a different story.

Because anyone can be a content creator, the Web elevates content of weak narrativity. YouTube is full of videos of cats on keyboards or kids building snowmen. These are moments rather than stories–sometimes pregnant moments, but often everyday ones.  But the accumulation of these discrete, everyday moments, linked together through tags, might begin to feel like a larger story.

The currency of storytelling on the Web is not text or pictures but multimedia. Da Vinci wrote that painting was “mute poetry” and poetry “blind painting,” implying the limitations of each medium. Is multimedia an opportunity to transcend the limitations of text, images, and audio on their own? I don’t know; that sounds lofty. But if done well, it’s hard to resist the impact of this combination.