Abbe Don: Right. Right. I'm with you. OK. So, just getting back to the orality issues. Most of the stories that are submitted to me – or people choose to share with me – are first person and they're anecdotal. Though they arrive in text and they're typed and emailed, I think if you looked at them structurally, they are more like oral story than like a literary story.

Ong identified what he called a kind of secondary orality. He was writing, I think, in the early '80s and my image of him is sort of standing on this cliff going, "Wow, there's something really cool happening out there and I'm going to call it Secondary Orality and not a whole lot of it has happened yet, but I'm going to put a stake in the ground." So I think that was a really interesting stake to put in the ground and I think he was right.

In terms of theoretical framework, much of it seems to me to be about two things, it's connection and also giving people permission. It's like when I'm putting myself out there, whether it's on stage or on the Web, and being vulnerable, I think that gives people permission to tell their own story. You know? There’s this model that says this is OK. So I think prompting is about permission and I think the other thing is about connection. That can be the."I'm like you" connection or "Gosh, that reminds me of..." type of connection. Or, often, it's deeper. There's a spiritual or soulful or kindred spirit sort of connection. For me, those are often the most moving stories and anecdotes. Sometimes those come back in the form of actual stories where someone is choosing to share a story about one of their ancestors. Sometimes it's just someone that writes me and says, "I had tears in my eyes reading your great-grandmother's story."

One of my favorites is this woman in Mississippi. She wrote this amazingly beautiful anecdote about, sort of a Proustian memory of her grandmother's sedar. I asked her if I could publish it, because she didn't think of it so much as a story as just sharing that experience with me.

Then the other thing that starts to happen, too, that I get a big kick out of – and this happens on genealogy sites, but I think it happens in a somewhat different or more playful way with "Bobby's Back Porch", is that people start to find connections with each other. Either their families were from a similar town, or in fact, they are distant cousins or distant relatives in some way.

Interviewer: Alright. It almost goes without saying that Jewish cultural history is about memory and that, in a sense, the survival of the culture is about memory. So it's not surprising that a number of storytellers come from that tradition, but also a lot of interest in connecting up with genealogy – in particular, fleshing out the genealogy through personal story has been quite high in that community.

Abbe Don: Right. Now here's an interesting side note. Phyllis and her husband were Jewish, but her grandmother – the Eischelman family is not Jewish. So, anyway, for whatever it's worth.

Interviewer: For whatever it's worth.

Abbe Don: Yeah.

Interviewer: Technology. It seems that we're looking at two advantages. One is the advantage at creating media because the tools are easier and the other is the advantage of distributing media because of the Internet. You've moved more toward the Internet and the Story Bee™, what are your thoughts about the tools that are available to us now and what you would hope we would have in the future for this process of gathering and encouraging stories?

Abbe Don: Well, I think the tools right now are a big pain in the ass.

"Oh, another intelligent quote from Abbe Don."

I think they're really difficult. I think right now they're much more about technology than about storytelling. So I think there's still a real bar that you have to cross over. There is some way in which the Web has been a great step forward in the terms of the kind of connectiveness and the fact that it's open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and available worldwide. So, in the case of the Story Bee™, we did workshops in San Francisco, New York, Tel Aviv, Moscow, and St. Petersberg, and that was really remarkable. When I first started doing this, I don't think it would even have been conceived of this possibility.

On the other hand, it was very static. It mentioned text and it still takes way too long to download and too long to go from one place to another and to do the kinds of stuff that I do with HyperCard, in terms of the ways in which I made connections. To do that on the Web requires a big fancy database. The bar to go there is much higher. The bar to get started is probably easier. But the bar to take advantage of the computational aspects of the computer is much higher. So I'd like to see that become much more dynamic, much more fluid.

I really miss doing video, but I kind of gave up on additional video for awhile because I just felt like I was fighting the tools all the time. I really like the fluidity of video and particularly the audio component. I'm kind of just now getting back into that. But then you have to deal with the compressions, the resolutions, and drive speed, blah, blah, blah.

Abbe Don: I just felt like the effort that it took to construct digital video wasn't worth the effort given the result. And I'm also at a point in my career where I spent most of my time earning a living and less of my time making art and telling stories. So I felt like I had to be where could I get the most bang for my buck if I was in a world of limited time and limited resources. I think that was, for me, one of the almost painful things about growing up, you know?

Interviewer: Right. You have to put those limitations on yourself.

Abbe Don: Yeah.

Interviewer: Let's talk a little bit about interactivity versus linearity.

Abbe Don: OK.

Joe Lambert: Because I think you have a lot to add to that conversation. You discussed in your description of your own work things you learned about making interactive work. I'm particularly concerned about the emotional impact of interactive work. Are there examples of the way you feel your own work sustains the emotional power that a well made linear work creates? Or do you think we're comparing apples and oranges.

I think that linear and interactive stories are fundamentally, qualitatively different. Linear storytelling, particularly movies as we know them at the end of the 20th century, are a phenomenal storytelling medium. We have some really sophisticated cinematic storytellers. I think whether we're talking about independent films or big productions like "Private Ryan" or "Schindler's List", those are really powerful and really wonderful. I'm not at all interested in replacing those, necessarily. I do think there is another kind of story to be told. But I am not sure it would be what we have called interactivity. Because I don't actually think clicking on a piece of underlined text is terribly interactive. So I think it's a word that's been used a lot.

I think that what passes as interactive storytelling is definitely not linear storytelling, and I think there are ways that you can use video or other inherently linear media to be nonlinear. Right? That’s a strategy that the film makers have used, flashback or flash forward. I think there's other things you can do with the computer, and I think a big part of it is somehow incorporating the user as a co-creator, a co-participant. That's one element of interactivity. I think another element is this kind of multiple perspective or interruption. That's one thing that I think "We Make Memories" did fairly well.

There were a lot of emotional stories in "We Make Memories” that make people cry that are only 90 seconds long. I think some of the work people do in you guy's workshop is incredibly emotionalYou may be right that it's harder to sustain that kind of emotional build up in this medium or that we don't have many good examples, but I don't think that's it's impossible.

Interviewer: Right. Well it kind of goes back to if your grandmother had an emotional impact on you – or great-grandmother – and she told nonlinear stories, then it must be possible.

Abbe Don: Right. Right.

Interviewer: When I talked to Mark Petrakis, his opening statement was, “digital storytelling is a good moniker for a small group of people who have just started hanging their hat around the issues of storytelling. But I don't believe there will be digital storytelling until there's character driven intelligent agents in which this machine and you are doing things that you couldn't quite do with another person.” Mark’s idea was the machine's has a character in it that it does things to you or for you in an immersive environment. It is not yet available, but certainly the work that you were talking about in Guides, was moving toward this direction. You’ve addressed these same in terms of agency and the stage metaphor. Are you imagining that there will ever be that kind of artificial intelligence? Or do we really want that?

Abbe Don: That's sort of like the ultimate holodeck? Let’s take the computer out of it, right? We have a lot of different kinds of storytelling activities. We have sitting around the family album, right? Where the pictures act as memory aids and people tell stories. We have people who are inspired for whatever reason to do their own memoir or autobiography. In fact, there was an article in the AARP quarterly magazine about this huge phenomenon right now of people over 50, over 60 who are writing their memoirs. Partially because I think people are healthier at that age and people have had more education. There’s this sense of wanting to leave your mark on the world.

We have examples of role playing, whether that's improv exercises or improvisational groups or whether or not those are people that get together for things like the renaissance fair or these mystery dinner parties. Then we have traditional theater. Within traditional theater you have avant guard features like Brecht and breaking the fourth law. So I think there is all these different types of what I would call storytelling or narrative activity that have nothing to do with the computer. Then I think you have a mapping of these different activities onto the computer.

In the case of the role playing stuff, you have MUDs and MOOs as perhaps the one to one correlate there. In the case of the storytelling with the photo album, you have my kind of work being as what the kind of stuff that you guys are doing. There's also the kind of game component – the adventure game. So I think those are all pieces of the puzzles.

Am I personally interested in cracking the big narrative – you interacting with the world agency thing? Not in and of itself. For me, the more interesting model is what Tim Orin talked about last year, which is kind of a combination of assimilation of elements– i.e., the machine has some kind of intelligence combined with a place to share personal story telling and a community of readers. Because, for me to tell my stories out on the Web to whoever might drop by is not as compelling to me as knowing that there is a community of readers who have a way of responding so that I have some sense of who that audience is. I'm not such a narcissist, but I just want to tell my story for its own sake.

I think the intersection of the kind of agency, intelligence, simulation stuff with the personal story, with the community component who are a kind of collective memory – to me, that's the sweet spot. Then, yes, some component of that might be game-like. You know what I mean? Some component of that might be role playing where it's not clear that the other character is another human or a computer generated character. That I think is really interesting territory and I don't know of a lot of people that are actually doing anything in that way.

Interviewer: I agree with you. I think that that is precisely where my interest would go. The world of computers with a tremendous amount of character-driven agency is great, but I, like most people, am just willing to wait for those tools to arrive and focus on what the current tools suggest in terms of personal storytelling.

What are your future projects? What do you think are some of the other issues?

Abbe Don: One of the things that I'm hoping to work on is to combine some of the earlier stuff I did in "We Make Memories" with a kind of indexing and dynamic suggestion tool as a way of sort of recommending stories within this collection of stories... What I'm hoping in "Bubbe's Back Porch" is that as this collection of stories emerges or this collective portrait that has been contributed to by multiple that you can find what is interesting to you or what's relevant to you. That would mean a more sophisticated mechanism for sorting a list of related themes. Because "Well, here's all the journey stories" or "Here's all the romance stories" doesn't tell you a whole lot. The question I have is, as those stories begin to emerge, as that collection portrait begins to emerge, how do you then enable people to move through it in a way that is, itself, a kind of interesting story experience.

I'm also still really interested in tools to help people do what I do. What I do for myself, for my family, is really satisfying and compelling. When other people see what I've done, they want to do it; they've asked me to do it for them. You know, I've sat down and looked at the economics of the kind of labor of love of what I do. Assuming people want something similar to the kind of aesthetics that I bring to it, it just doesn't scale. So I am very much interested in looking at the tool side, if you might call them intelligent storytelling tools that would help people tell their stories.

And then, the flip the whole thing on its ear, I'm really fascinated by going back to these very old, somewhat primal biblical stories and exploring this kind of personal mythic continuum. In the Jewish tradition, there's been this notion of commenting on these stories called [midrosh]. So, I'm interested in first of all illustrating these traditional stories and making them accessible and then providing a mechanism and tools for people to do their own [midrosh], basically, their own commentary. I think that kind of project would take me almost full circle.

Interviewer:That's great. That's great.

Abbe Don: So those are near to midterm kinds of things. Big, future stuff?? Truth be told, I haven't thought about it. I think very early in my career, I was very focused on the far out future and I've found that as an artist that it's not a sustainable strategy. So I miss some of that great idea stuff and want to find a balance. Like the event technology group at MIT where I was thinking about lots of big ideas, you know, I sort of swung the pendulum the other direction and went, you know, "What can I build today for very little." So, I think in the early part of my career, I was in environments like event technology at Apple or in the MIT media lab that was very future-focused. After Kalida Lab, when I realized that all this future stuff, no one ever got to see. I think I swung in the other direction and said, "What can I do with the here and now, that's sustainable and affordable?" The Web, I think, very much fits that picture. But I don't want to lose sight of the ways in which the kind of future stuff pushes, enables me to kind of push the edge. So I'm kind of interested also in terms of continuum, continuing to explore that space as well.