Interviewer: Can you give some information about your background and work?

Scott Rosenberg: I started my writing life with the determination that what I wanted to be when I grew up was a theater critic. And I was lucky enough to get to that point very quickly. I came to San Francisco about 12 years ago, in 1986, to be the theater critic at the Examiner. I did that for six years and loved it. But began to feel a little burned out on the daily newspaper routine towards the end of it.

In 1990 I began to get very interested in how artists were using technology and started covering a little bit of that on the side. Among some of the more experimental theater artists in San Francisco, there was this open cross-over between arts and technology. That meant I had much work to view. It was an exciting moment in the local arts scene.

Interviewer: We were kind of in ground zero of the entire new wave of creative endeavors.

Scott Rosenberg: Also around '92 I switched to movie criticism. Hollywood was beginning to go nuts over "special effects" and it was the era of the supposed convergence between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. We are still waiting for this convergence. In 1995 I left the Examiner and helped found Salon on the web. I have been running the technology coverage for Salon ever since. Salon's technology coverage has a strong cultural component as well. We are not just looking at which is happening in chip design, we are looking at how all of the technologies are changing our lives.

Interviewer: When you first heard of digital storytelling, how did it strike you.

Scott Rosenberg: Because I have been a critic for so long, my initial reaction to anything is skepticism. Digital storytelling, at first, sounds meaningless. Storytelling is storytelling. There is oral storytelling. There is written storytelling. With digital, our associations are with the storage medium as much as an artistic medium, so it would be similar to suggesting videotape storytelling or paper storytelling. From that angle it is not a critical part of what makes a story important or valuable

Two things jolted me off my skeptical stance. I was seeing work under this banner from really interesting, creative people who were doing something a little bit different. Secondly, it is a descriptive phrase that leads into dozens of other concepts. When we talk about digital storytelling today, I think we are all thinking about interactivity, the internet, and the power of easy to use tools in more people's hands than previously had access to them.

The phrase is an invitation to questions rather than an easy to grasp concept. Part of the fun that we get to keep hashing out the definition.

Interviewer: It is an indefinable term that we'll continue to try to define. For some people it is a non-sequitur. The words don't belong together.

Scott Rosenberg: Low tech versus high tech. The idea that technology is somehow completely rational and completely divorced from the social world, is one we are gradually shedding.

Scott Rosenberg: And I just finished reading a book that is going to be out in about two or three months by Eric Davis, a former writer with the Village Voice. It is called Tech-gnosis. G-n-o-s-i-s. The subtitle is Magic, Myth and Spirituality in the Digital Age.

This is not a book about religion on the net. It is a cultural history of how we can't escape the ghost in the machine. And whenever we try to pretend that technology is just rational, we are suddenly surprised and shocked when people formed cults around it. The book helps explain why there is a perfectly natural connection between cultural inheritance and technology. If you think about the Dead Sea Scrolls as papyrus storytelling, a particular technology that had the virtue of surviving in a cave for 2,000 years. It comes to us and suddenly we have to rethink the entire history of Christianity.

Interviewer: And just as our digital communications technologies are being cast as harbingers of doom, I read recently that Socrates told the legend of Thoth, the inventor of dice, arithmetic, astronomy and writing. Thoth took his inventions to the king of Egypt, Thamus, and while impressed with the other inventions, he had no use for writing. He told Thoth that truth would not be serviced by writing, because people would trust the writing, and not the truth inside themselves.

Scott Rosenberg: This is also the Marshall McLuhan idea that or everything that we add in the direction of one technology, we are amputating existing capability that we have. And that is absolutely true. The kind of memory that people can create today is just dependent on these external technologies and inventions. In some ways, we can generate tons more content. But, is it as durable? It is physically durable, but perhaps less socially or culturally durable because it is not enforced by tradition. There is no demand on memory, as in an oral culture when a parent tells a child, " Remember, or it will be gone." That gives stories tremendous power in our lives.

Interviewer: We have never been more self-aware of this process of loss of ourselves as we adapt a new technology. It is shaping the way we approach our work in the new media.