Interviewer: And that what we are looking toward is developing that kind of literacy. That through story and through conversation we have our bits. In the same way that Dana actually, in Next Exit, has his bits. But he generally does the same show. But if we said to Dana, who is that picture of or what else about your life or whatever that he has shown us a path toward having these stories. And it is not ubiquitous.

Scott Rosenberg: That's right.

Interviewer: It is like a trunk...

Scott Rosenberg: Right. Yes.

Interviewer: ...of keepsakes in which, or the family album. It is literally something that you can pull out as acute.

Scott Rosenberg: And the, it is not the... Maybe the single most important skill in doing that is the skill of the editor. We could, we are having this conversation and I know and I hope and trust that you are going to be boiling it down and sort of removing my ums and faltering half sentences. And then, after that, which is the first level of editing, saying well, this two-thirds of it is just repetition and these three exchanges here really crystallize something. This is it. And that, what you have done... I mean that is not just...

You know, people think, oh, an editor, editing is some kind of second level function. In storytelling, I think it is, you know it is what you leave out. And the most...the danger that the technology, one danger of technology today is storage is so cheap and a web page can be as long as you want. And people don't have either the incentive or the skill or the time to distill. And edit their stories carefully.

And it is, I mean even just on a very mundane level of editing my section in Salon, I know that if this were in print we would be shortening stories more than we are. And we fall down that way because the web page is infinitely extendable.

Interviewer: Even though that as we are learning, screen reading has the opposite effect. That we are willing, sometimes to sit in a resolution of a printed text, longer than we are willing to sit in the resolution of screen writing.

Scott Rosenberg: So, and that is just an example of, that the force of inertia and...

Interviewer: Right.

Scott Rosenberg: ...the force of entropy is always towards, you know, editing less tightly and not filtering as much and the force of the story is to break free of that as much as possible and to be ruthless, really in telling just what needs to be told and no more. Maybe a little bit less. And leaving some of the story to be, to be completed by the listener.

Interviewer: Yes, absolutely. I believe that is... You get to see a lot of work. What, what beyond what has managed to get to the Digital Storytelling Festival or just, you know, as you reviewed things and trend watched a little, what things are you seeing that you like a lot? Where do you see some of this stuff of narrative and new media going. Are there any great examples?

Scott Rosenberg: Right now I actually have any kind of...

Interviewer: Crystalline pieces yet.

Scott Rosenberg: I mean...

Interviewer: Where would you like it to go? I mean...?

Scott Rosenberg: I could probably, and this is...talking about memory and how... I could go look at my...

Interviewer: List of articles.

Scott Rosenberg: ...my files and I could probably come up with an answer for you.

Interviewer: That is the problem, you write too damn much. Yes.

Scott Rosenberg: Sitting here, I think that the most important direction for the people that are using technology to tell their stories is one that I think you guys have certainly been pushing for a while. And it is the, the use of whatever tools work today... Not... I think a lot of people, I still hear every, every week I hear somebody complaining about the way I have been saying, well the problem is that we just don't have the bandwidth. And it is true that if your passion is full motion video and, the web is not a great place for you right now.

But if your passion is telling a story, it just doesn't much matter, I don't think. My experience from covering theater for years was that the budget that a theater company had had very little to do with the quality of the work. I mean it is true that there people who deserved much bigger budgets than they had. But the limitations of, in the case of small theater, it was often financial and in digital technology it is often technical. That limitations foster creativity. And I don't... I think that people are very, sometimes sort of make excuses about oh, technology just isn't here yet.

And if your priority is conveying a story, if you can do it, you can do it in Peter Brooks' ideas that theater was just an empty space with an actor and one person watching. Similarly, with technology, you can... I have seen... We have all seen people do remarkable things with a simple web page and words. Or we have read exchanges on online forums that themselves constituted stories that were pure text. Or we have seen just examples of people using very simple technology to move us.

Whereas when I think about the insane volume, kind of very brave and creative but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to grandly unite video games and movies and interactive branching narratives and this whole field where, as far as I can tell, the number of stories that anyone can remember is [unintelligible] maybe missed. Okay, so you have one creative teen that managed to tell a story that captured people's imaginations, using what at the time was a pretty advanced set of technology tools, today it has been a few years, it has already become...