Interview with Scott Rosenberg

Scott Rosenberg: The immediate conclusion is, "oh, my god, computers make people unhappy. This is a horrible thing." And there is some truth to that. But is completely ignores what is the quality of the experience that people are having online that makes them feel this way. Is it inherent in the nature of the medium? Is it inherent in the way we built it?

My initial experience online was on the Well , a close knit, completely not anonymous, geographically centered, online community that worked. But five years ago or eight years ago, a study of people on the Well and said, was their online experience making them lonelier or sadder or more depressed? The answer would be no.

Interviewer: I have decided the well is an exploration in the American utopian society and that it is at almost the exact kind of arc of development and demise.

Scott Rosenberg: I think that is totally accurate. But it gave people like Howard Reingold and others who have written about it a very vivid sense of the utopian potential of the technology which, as it spread and evolved in other directions, it hasn't fulfilled. And maybe it won't, maybe that is inevitable.

You have got Sherry Turkle's book, "Life On The Screen." She looks at online experiences of people experimenting with divergence of personality, trying on different roles. She examines the healthy side of that.

And I look at it and think, well, my gut hunch... I haven't done the studies that she's done or that I hope other people are beginning to do, is that, is that that is a great source of this kind of anomie. That people... In fact if you think about what's, what people are doing, they are trying on so many different personal stories that I think it becomes easy to lose track of which is the real one. Which actually matters to them?

Interviewer: Which is the real one? No, she actually addresses that. To some degree. You are right, she is more optimistic that this somehow fits into a wonderful post-modern paradigm which is an end of something in itself as well. And so there is that kind of, well, you know, now we understand multiple sense of identity and so that's the end and now we...

Scott Rosenberg: And everyone will develop this great critical sensibility and...

Interviewer: And we know that is not true. I mean, arguably, the entry into story and certainly our approach to it is about liter... It is just about, we have developed the sensitivity to film as a dominant, film/television as this kind of dominant cultural medium and yet we don't get to speak it much.

Interviewer: And so it is like part of the process is learning the literacy of speaking in immersive multiple image based media. And that the storytelling part also is not a different literacy than the literacy of text.

Interviewer: All of those things we need to develop, critical awareness is part of that, being a critique is being part of that and consuming a lot of stuff with a critical perspective is part of that. But that we are all aware that if we have some sense of the facility of doing it ourselves that we are going to be better at it, meaning you become a better writer, I mean critique of written things by writing it or...

Scott Rosenberg: The moment you do, the moment you create something yourself, you experience other artifacts in that medium, completely differently whether it is, liabler to strum three chords on a guitar. I instantly listen to every piece of music I heard differently. It was that simple. And I still can't play very well but it doesn't matter.

Interviewer: No, absolutely. It is part of the senses of literacy so, in that sense, I think one of the... I agree we're in a narcissistic moment. You know, or long moment. But that I think people are really open to improving their literacies in these languages that have dominated our culture and have manipulated us in so many ways to sell politics and to sell goods and services.

Scott Rosenberg: I mean that is the great... That is the upside of the moment, technologically, is precisely that.

Scott Rosenberg: That the broadcast mode is what we all grew up with and it was this unapproachable, unassailable, incredibly powerful force in our lives and to be able to take some control of that and use it for our own ends is incredibly intoxicating. There is...

Scott Rosenberg: Well, I mean what happens and what I think people who are looking to find a way for this concept of digital storytelling to reach out in the culture, I think it is also important that people not sort of be deceived or be...receive too grandiose a notion that, oh, I will make my little quick time movie and become a movie star. There is this seduction of, it is sort of what happened on the web, you know. If you look at the earliest coverage of the web, this sort of, well everyone at the website will become his or her own media star.

And it happened in a few cases. And there is still the slight potential but the millions of people who are putting up home pages on U.S. Cities and places like that, they are not attracting the attention of millions of people. And there is nothing wrong with that. That is totally fine as long as they weren't expecting to do so.

And I think that there was... By now, people understand that on the web, I think. With television, we are still under the spell a little bit. I mean, if people live through the era of public access and all, they may feel a little inoculated against that. They know, oh, yes we did this kind of...we seized the airwaves and nobody was watching. Very few people were watching. And maybe we did what we wanted to do but it was not...

There was just this inherent tension. There is an inherent contradiction between the idea of sort of universal access to media and the culture of celebrity. Every... It is not possible, we don't have the attention span for everyone to be a celebrity. And who needs that?

Scott Rosenberg: But... But there is so much, but our culture is so infused with this that I think that there are people who... So much of the American story is the Horatio Alger and the little guy who becomes a star that a lot of this, the pitch for putting media into everybody's hands is the idea that maybe you'll win the lottery. Maybe you'll get your face on a million screens.

Scott Rosenberg: And that has a potential, I think, to kind of derail some people.

Interviewer: Yes. There is no question that... That if we approach even the internet with the language of its alternative broadcast medium, then we are... I mean one would replicate the weaknesses of the current... But we also will miss kind of the point of multi-point to multi-point communication. So what we have discussed in the context is, and this is kind of full circle, the idea of conversational media use.

Interviewer: That it extends a sense of interpersonal conversation and in a way brings it back to the lives of them in the sense that interpersonal communication can be the person to person discussion like we are having, or it could be you and I sitting in front of a stage, on the stage having the same conversation or either one of us giving a talk. And being able to sense, when you look at the Sherry Turkel book on the table here, and actually pull up Sherry Turkel's website or pull up Sherry Turkel's picture or just, say, listen to this bit of interview from one of her 17 year old, you know, clients who talked about his...

Interviewer: ...becoming online... Becoming a woman who played a man who played a woman, you know, or whatever. And that that was immediate, everybody would go ah ha, you know that is such a good way to make that point.

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