Interviewer: Right. In a way we are talking about two different things. We're talking about information exchange, and we're talking about the emotionally driven exchange that the idea of storytelling represents.

Ken Harper: Right. I think what happens is knowledge is essentially a matter of encoded experience. The way that we code that best as human beings is in stories. Information is perhaps one step up from data. Data and information by themselves are not necessarily useful. Until you can put them in a context that is much more meaningful. I think that is what stories do.

Interviewer: Part of what we need to do is encourage a new kind of storytelling culture in which the value of story exchange is increased. Because in some ways in a broadcast culture there is a tendency to decrease the sense of the value of individual stories over the [meta] stories or the stories that are considered commercially valuable.

Ken Harper: I agree with you. I agree with you one hundred percent. I think what happens Joe is that with digital storytelling, the audience is also a storyteller. The whole notion of audience is changed. Perhaps this has to do with the way we have traditionally regarded artists. For the last century or two, artists have come to be regarded as somewhat separate from society. Therefore you have the artist as sort of the new priest. Just look at the kind of exchanges that go on, or don't go on, in museums, or galleries, or churches. If you go back a few hundred years, or a few thousand years ago, you would probably see a little bit more open exchange, prior to the stratification of society and so on and so forth.

The thing that was exciting to me as I was out traveling and visiting with people who I thought and had heard were pushing the envelope here, was that it was really a participatory activity. It was not something that was organized along the lines of the broadcast model, which encourages passivity.

Interviewer: A lot of our interest is the idea that the accessibility of media creation at the point of its most artistic function, which is editing, has suddenly become much more affordable and realistic. Whether it's the simple documentary style of panning over a still image while your voice tells you something more about that still image, and some music plays in the background, or actually trying to compose home video or video you shot in some meaningful way. That part of it is that we have a literacy campaign to have people think of themselves as speaking in the lingua franca of the previous century.

Film, arguably in our kind of coherent understanding of what [filmic] meaning is about, a lot of us get that really well because we're so engulfed and immersed in it. But we don't get to talk back. So a lot of our interest is also the way multimedia creation in particular assists people in talking in a language that they know has more emotional and psychological effectiveness. As opposed to where we are now which is essentially exchange of text, and that can be very effective. We are realizing, just with the Web, that a lot more people would make sites about their favorite thing and want to exchange it with other people who have the same favorite thing, or some favorite thing that they might want to exchange with people. We imagine only more of that.

Ken Harper: Yeah. I agree with you. I think there will be communities that are built around common experiences. There may be more communities than fewer. There may be mega communities. There may be macro communities. There may be micro communities. But I think that storytelling will be essential to all of them.

Interviewer: What do you think -- the ways that you can, if you will, convince people in the corporate world -- whether it's, -- you've been with Intel which is on the hardware end and the software end, that this is important? Because the dominant dialogue still seems about being, "How do we mirror broadcast on the Web?" or, "How do we mirror the history of broadcast on the Web?" So what are your strategies, or what is your thinking about the strategies in terms of convincing more people that things like cable modems should have bi-directional bandwidth, as opposed to "a whole-lot-in" and "very-little-out"? A button click out.

Ken Harper: I think part of this is that unfortunately there's not enough people who realize that every new medium grew only after it realized that it could not replicate, or that it was not the old medium. Television became television when it ceased trying to be a sort of visual radio. I think that there are lot of experiences that people are going to have to have that will enable a greater exchange of rich resources. I'm not terribly concerned about what kind. [Do] you have to have full bandwidth, bi-directional duplex bandwidth right away? -- I don't think so. What you have to do, is be able to show the kinds of experiences that you can have with that bandwidth so that you go off and create it.

Part of me is very much a cheerleader for digital storytelling. But the other part of me, the one that has worked as an editor, and has worked in a university environment, recognizes that there is some -- you want to be able to -- not necessarily teach, but have people discover that a story is not necessarily a monologue where you have an endless amount of time to say whatever comes to your mind. It needs to be interesting. To be interesting it's going to have to edited. It's going to have to have some kind of structure. Whatever that structure might be.

I think that a lot of us don't think like that. We haven't been trained as a society to think like that. The people who think like that are typically those who are already in those sorts of professions. As you know, stories have beginnings they have middles, and they have ends. Not necessarily all of them, but this is sort of the tradition. A beginning and a middle and an end can be separated, there can be things that interrupt them etc., but --

Interviewer: It's essentially desire, action, and transformation. What did I want? What did I do toward getting it, and what did I learn in the process?

Ken Harper: Right. Right. I think the other thing that I wanted to throw in here is that what is it that has to happen for people and corporations to get it? Here's another anecdote. I was being pitched a couple of months ago by an outfit putting on a conference in Newport Beach. It was on, [New Media Marketing], or [Interactive Marketing], something like that. I told them I didn't really have a budget to support what they were doing, but something they should consider having there is digital storytelling. I cited three examples and two days later they called me back to keynote this thing. After I talked to the sales person, the salesperson talked to someone else, they realized that they didn't have this on the agenda, and that they needed to get it. I couldn't go, but sent a colleague in my place. We had three demonstrations from three different digital storytellers. I received the greatest amount of email I have ever gotten from a public event, that I didn't go to, about how wonderful this was. So, a lot of this is simply a matter of exposure. It's exposure and getting the tools deployed.

I think that part of getting it is to realize that digital storytelling is not film, it's not on-line novels, and it's not on-line short stories. It's a combination of what it's not, and then it's experimenting with what it is, and what can be done with it. There's a nice -- goodly amount of time ahead of us for a lot of rich experimentation. In a year or two, maybe we'll see the flowers on this thing coming up.

Interviewer: That makes sense. Do you want to talk a little bit more about your conception of the [Digital Storytelling Exchange] in particular?