Interviewer: One of the arguments of the book is that there is a one-to-one relationship between the ability to make effective stories about one’s life and personal power. Personal power in the sense your ability to succeed at the goals you have set for yourself.

Justin Hall: But it's tough, I was never premeditated. I mean I just remembered I always did a ton of public speaking in high school and grade school too. And whenever there was some injustice...I mean I often stand up in forums where I'm not supposed to speak and speak anyway. And I have done this since I was young. And so in some ways, not at all premeditated that I get into the writing on the Web, that feeds the career in public speaking and so forth. It's that the Web is just, sometimes I think it's just that personal power is just what I gravitated to naturally. And it wasn't any...

Interviewer: And that it was important...

Justin Hall: What's that


Interviewer: And that it's an important standing. Some people are storytellers some people are not.

Justin Hall: Which is why...

Interviewer: I mean they don't think about it, they are just storytellers.

Justin Hall: I never thought about it. But people are always telling another story or whatever, and you know whatever they say, and oh, I guess I'm telling a story, I'm a storyteller or something. But I don't stop to think about, I have a very hard time saying what I am, or what I do.

Interviewer: Yeah. But I, do I take from that you don't believe. that there are aspects of storytelling that can be a learned skill?

Justin Hall: Well that is what is so interesting about the Digital Storytelling Festival. I think it was one of the first times that I saw people that really thought of themselves as storytellers, get up on stage and tell some stories. You know what I mean? And there were people who like clearly had an act. And they were doing things that they had done and practiced and tried out, and rehearsed and fixed, and you know what I mean? And that was really like story telling as kind of a learned skill. And taking what it is that feels like life and that is excitement and energy and really channeling it and focusing it and designing it and into a kind of compact piece of thing. And I mean Dana kind of walks the line because he's got a hypertext reference for the whole thing. And it is always kind of a grand adventure of having to sustain your own story. And proposing to his wife on stage, was a nice way to mix things up a little bit. But there was another guy who stood up and did a kind of fairy tale. And it was the things that he did in his routine were very um...they didn't seem to come to him as the story was being told, but it was rather things that he had worked out in advance.

Interviewer: That was Mark Lewis.

Justin Hall: Yeah.

Interviewer: The politics of this for me are about the kind of balanced equation that existed before literacy about whose story got heard in the marketplace of stories. Obviously kings and queens and people that had power story got heard a lot more, but in a more balanced marketplace the shaman storyteller, the person that spoke from his ecstatic experience got heard because nobody could do what they did. And that there were more of those people that understood the relationship between unique life experience and self understanding and therefore they would gravitate in themselves toward the ability to tell stories, than are generated since literacy came to be, and more particularly since electronic media came to be.

Justin Hall: Encouraging passivity or something?

Interviewer: Yeah, well, encouraging passivity and essentially encouraging a sense that storytelling is a specialist expertise that comes from extraordinarily long technical training and access to resources as opposed to a person declaring, "Uncle Freddie is the best storyteller I have ever heard." He would do it over the dinner table. There are less and less uncle Freddie's because there were less and less people that made it part of their life experience to recite story.

Justin Hall: You made me think of a couple of things. I wonder if Geoff Chaucer was a shaman. He channeled stories of people that were below kings and queens and raised them to a level of dignity or importance. Those stories were a template for the age, and have sustained the test of time. My brief studies of shamanism suggest that maybe shamans weren't so comfortable with their role. Perhaps they were probably what we would today refer to schizophrenics, people that had no choice but to hear and see stories around them. There are times when you are a writer and you feel the burden of being a writer when you see a truly depressing story. If you want to talk about seeing a pervasion of Buddhism throughout the world you see suffering and decay and death all of the time in everything. And there is so much sadness that people carry around with them. And when you can be attuned to that sadness it can be a very heavy thing to see. Shamanic people were responsible for making people happy or feel confident with their lives and that the spirits were inveighing on their side and managing people's spiritual affairs with stories. They were bearing a heavy burden that they might have been bearing because they had mentally troubling insights. It’s selection by brain chemistry or genetics... Or by social ostracism, just people who were different and so they could see things that other people were not seeing. And so that is both a curse and a blessing that attraction, a personal power that we kill those people very often.

Interviewer: Undoubtedly. But in a funny way, in a culture that pays attention to a shamans' voice, even if it kills them once in a while, if it pays attention to them it learns some of those skills themselves. The Asian Buddhist metaphor is a correct one. The skill of a complete sense of empathy that can absorb the screwy and terrible things that human beings will do to each other is profound.
When you enter into those cultures you have a much more profound sense of the human condition. Arguably in the Western culture we don't even listen to those voices. We don't' even kill our shamen, we ignore them. Or in the case of certain artists, maybe take their funding away.

Justin Hall: Yeah, or we fill them full of drugs or whatever.

Interviewer: In that sense we ignore compassion, we ignore empathy, we ignore listening to the real things that are going on in life and watch other things.

Justin Hall: I wish that I could have more of a perspective. And that is one of the reasons why I want to live to be old is just to be able to look back and kind of do an analysis. But is America going through a media saturation process, and is the Web as an integral part of that? When TV was first was introduced it was such a time filler and a place of magical worlds. And then as time goes on movies become reflective of that. The Truman Show represents our awareness that the television is around us in certain ways that we are not entirely comfortable with. And you know the portrayals the modern life are really the most gripping things, but they are also troubling because is it an ordinary life if it's always under surveillance and so forth. And Web literacy is really exciting to me for that, because so many people have access tools. TV is like a mutant form of communication because as a storytelling medium, very few people have access to it. Video cameras changed that a little bit. But the Web changes that more. And so what will the Web look like in ten years, it will be a billion TV channels where everybody has got their own little video camera, they are broadcasting to their parents and friends. And stuff all over the world, or will it be like most people tuned into ten different channels of ESPN and CNN and MTV?

Interviewer: Well don't you think, and what you're doing is pointing it in a direction of what it will be? It will be a way to invite people to look at you if they chose, form collaborations in the pot, as you described it, the place where we stir a bunch of personalities together becomes bigger than any one of us. We will make communities of meaning that are self aware about what all of these mediated processes do to us. We want to find ways to enjoy the media without it overpowering our lives.

Justin Hall: The tough thing there is who is the ''we"? Because are my relatives in Nebraska going to expect to be able to participate in that community of co-creation and stuff? Or are they just going to want their news? Are they going to want to look up their vitamins and whatever information they need personally through the information sources? But the story telling takes place in different realms for them?

Interviewer: I don't know. And that is more asking the question is the town square in Iowa still useful to them? If it is they will continue to use it. It's as if they belong to the Church of Christ for three generations of their family, but they had always wanted to belong a Church of Christ that was a little bit different, where the spiritual practice was slightly more open. But there is nobody else in that part of Iowa that wants this kind of Church of Christ, But there is somebody not that far away, they are in Kansas or in Oklahoma. And maybe we could make our church together, but we'll only get together you know once every other week. Or maybe well get together, you know we won't have the same physical Town Square, but we can create this virtual town square. Because really my interest was not to just be in this one neighborhood, although I like that neighborhood, it's just that I always wanted to have it closer to my quirky self. And that community of self-definition is really what bodes well for ubiquitous computing environments.

Justin: The toughest thing for me was early on I was so enamored of the reality I had been able to concoct and the exciting world in San Francisco I had seen through online and what it's like to chat with someone and schedule lunch and go meet them all at once and get email and being doing all of that stuff all of the time, that I really thought that this was the appropriate lifestyle for the planet. And then you know, you step back a little bit, you realize that it's not sustainable, you know of money and time and stuff like that. Ultimately people will just use the Internet for what they want to. For both idealists like me, who envision community and personal expression and an artistic online haven and the corporations who expect us all to want just want video on demand, you know the great bulk of people who go on-line want neither. And they want something in between that defies both of us. And it is an excitingly human way. And they will never do what you want or predict or anything.

Interviewer: That is probably true, and other ways they will do what they will always have done. And you know humans haven't changed that much and this probably won't change them that much.

Justin Hall: But the thing is when you're an early person, when you're an early person invested in the tool and you think the tool is great for one reason or another and it's impacted your life you tend to project that. Or invest physically, your resources or your money, you tend to project it in a different way. What happened with Electric Minds is that Howard really loved hanging out in virtual communities. And everybody who got involved loved it. And we thought that a lot of people would love it and that they would find studying virtual communities to be a really interesting thing. And to study technology would be really interesting because we all loved to talk about it all of the time. But it turns out that you can't get a hundred thousand people to look at virtual community studies every day in order to get people to advertise on them.

Interviewer: Yes, I think it’s part of the American history of the urge to create utopian settlement. From the model farming communities of the 1850’s to the hippie communes, it’s an old and powerful urge. And it usually has about a ten-year lifespan of experience. And arguably the Well had already played out. And in essence Howard was trying to see if the spirit of the Well could be privatized to some degree. But it was a phenomena. It happened. And it it's not going to happen like that again. And even with your site, there are lots of phenomena that don't happen because somebody consciously planned them. But because they serviced a group of people who became self aware of the usefulness of the utility in its creation, and used it for long as that was useful, whether it be a week or as a ten year utopian community

Interviewer: Let’s finish with your assessment of your future work. What would a storyteller like you be doing in the future?

Justin Hall: I see a future based on certain things I have in place. And then those things, always in the most astounding ways, they get taken away from you and get put back in different pieces. And so that whenever I concoct a scenario the whole thing gets rearranged in a rather dramatic and alarming way, someone tells me that is particular to this time astrologically. Nevertheless, I look into the future and I see myself in a couple of different ways. One is that I've got a job now it's kind of unusual. I get paid for three days a week of labor. Up to three days, so that means a half-day or three days. And I get paid the same amount. And it's enough to pay my bills on a monthly basis. And so it leaves anywhere between four and six days a week, for me to do whatever I want. And so I say this is great. This is what my life is going to look like? Well there might be some point where I really have to get sober. And that happened to me last summer. And I went to Honduras for two and a half months of no computing. But does that mean in the future that I'm going to get a job as a grocery in order to make sure that I know what is going on outside of this exciting little realm of which I'm an eager participant? Who are the people who don't chat all day long and yet are still 23 and are still trying to figure out what it means to be creative? Where am I going to live? I don't know.

San Francisco is such a wonderful place to be. But have you seen Seismic Solution? There are posters up at Ninth and Irving in the city that say, the computer revolutionaries have come and Revenge of the Nerds has reeked its havoc and now none of us can afford to live here anymore. And you know they have these charts of the rent of the same flat over a ten year period has gone up like a thousand fifteen hundred dollars or something. And they say; a Seismic Solution is coming. And then all of the weaklings will run away. And we'll have San Francisco back again. And I think to myself, wow, this is really sad. Everything I love has created- I love Wired and I loved working there and it was very exciting-but it created this frenzy that created a geography that I can't afford to live in any more. I can't afford to live in San Francisco. It's too hard to find a place. And I can't afford to live there. And so what does it mean that the thing that I love becomes so popular that I can't be there any more. And it forces me to go to West Oakland where I get held up or you know out somewhere else. And I have family in Nebraska. And every year there is calving in March and planting in April and May and harvest in October. And there is some pull on me in me to go be part of the land or go do something like that. There is a part of me that says could I live in a place like Nebraska and be part of an Internet community? And do I want to move to another country. I have such an open future, because I'm so young. I'm in a long-term relationship, but it's hard. So many things are fluid these days, it's tough to know where you stand with all of that. I really don't know. I think that I can say for sure that wherever I'll be I'll be telling stories. Because I went to Honduras and I learned, I knew no Spanish when I went there. But I learned enough broken ugly Spanish and I had one guy that worked as my partner for a few days with a non profit organization. There was one time that I got held up in an airport and did like a three like hour long hike along the same trail with my backpack and all of my stuff and chasing small planes to try to get them to land and stuff like that. And he thought that was very funny. He kept telling me to tell this story over and over again, like four times in one evening. And I said to myself, wow, I must be a storyteller, because this guy keeps asking me to tell stories because it makes him laugh. And so it doesn't' matter whether I have the Web or whether I have an audience of rapt IT professionals or whatever. It's just it's something that I do that makes people laugh that my misfortune and that I don't care. I mean that doesn't bother me about my. And I just could be anywhere and kind of doing some of the same stuff. And that is exciting. But you know it would be nice to know like Howard, my friend Howard Rheingold, he has a house in Marin and it's such a nice place to be. He has his garden and he knows that he likes to garden and paint and write. Me, I don't know am I going to be living in the country or the city or you know...West Coast, east coast, Copenhagen, you know writing. I don't know. I have a problem with my hands because of too much typing. And it's getting worse because I'm so excited about doing my bud.com, that my hands are feeling worse and worse. And so that might reach a point where I really have to reexamine what I do with my time. And kind of all up in the air.

Interviewer: No, I understand. That is an answer in and of itself. You will live in the moments that you life gives you and hope that it gives you plenty of them so that you can enjoy it all.

Justin Hall: That's right.

Interviewer: Well it's been a good conversation guy.

Justin Hall: Okay good.