To clarify, after some confusion on Twitter, I mean articles that might be reasonably well written, but are full of sweeping generalisations and muddled geography.
It's absurd. She stops in at Pretoria and Cape Town, but confidently pontificates on Africa with its "voodoo" and "blood-rhythm". The incident in the opening line, referring to cannibalism, has been refuted. Apparently, Witness X is unhinged. And where oh where is the "tourist compound" in Cape Town?
William Dalrymple in Old Delhi is at the top of my list too.
Acually, you've given me an idea Kevin. Mandela has spoken at length about places in Cape Town, and much of what he's said is publicly available. If we gathered that up, we might be able to turn it into a walk.
Thank you all for so many ideas. Now I just have to pitch the idea to David Bowie.
Suketu Mehta, definitely. I find walks in India most appealing for some reason.
I agree, ordinary people who have seen a thing or two often tell the best stories. That's part of the idea of course, we just want one or two big names to help grow our audience.
"10:45pm Pregaming, because we are awesome."
I'm wary of any narrow definition of storytelling. In the context of travel content, you might say that a listicle isn't storytelling, because of the way it's organised. It doesn't have a beginning, middle and an end, which is how some people might define a story, but a listicle can tell a story. That isn't all that helpful, of course, and defining storytelling might be like defining pornography: All you can say is, "I know it when I see it."
With that out of the way, my personal definition of storytelling is about identifying with something or someone, and in this the medium or form isn't important. If a set of photographs or a longform essay or even a listicle helps me to see the world from another perspective, it's telling a story. I think that is hardwired into how our minds work: to project our imaginations into something unfamiliar, we need a story, whether it's told to us or we tell it to ourselves.
I've just serendipitously chanced on a quote, via @thescriptlab:
"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."
Hannah Arendt
Print gave us labels to differentiate between storytellers -- labels like journalist, novelist, playwright and copywriter. Those labels are broken, and "content" and "blogging" are awful replacements. Storytelling takes us back to something simpler, and it's a word you can apply to all of digital media's many mashups and new forms.
I also think it has connotations of quality, because storytelling implies a relationship with real, engaged people, not an endless stream of eyeballs. And as digital media mature, that engagement is becoming more and more valuable.
At VoiceMap, we're working with a technical medium, and it's new enough to not really have a name. I tend to use "location-aware audio" but that phrase is extremely dry, and it can apply to things that aren't telling any kind of story at all. It also leaves me feeling like I need to explain what VoiceMap's routes actually are, so here goes: they're a series of mp3s connected to specific GPS co-ordinates that play through our mobile apps. That doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, does it?
The technical complexity of location-aware audio kept its costs high, and the only model that worked was for a company with the right equipment, software and expertise to sell it to another company with a customer headcount high enough to justify the overheads. I was involved in all of this a couple of years ago, when I edited location-aware audio for cruise ships and open-top buses, and I was frustrated by how little room there was to tell compelling stories. One business was meeting the requirements of another business, and the relationship between storytellers and their audience had been sidelined.
I thought I could start something that made this relationship central to the medium, and VoiceMap was born. We built a free publishing tool -- a WordPress for location-aware audio, if you like -- connected to a distribution platform that would allow users to charge for their routes and earn royalties, like Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. But that was only half of the battle: we also needed a way to bring journalists, novelists, playwrights, bloggers and tour guides together under a single banner, along with people whose backgrounds were in radio, digital, film or print. "Storyteller" did that for us, especially because it is stories that we want to bring to the fore, along with personal perspectives -- the things that make us say 'I hope', 'I remember' and 'I love'. They were missing from the medium before, but really bring it to life.
An editor at Macmillan once told me that they didn't consider VS Naipaul a travel writer because his non-fiction didn't include maps. Maps are so important, and they are better now by many orders of magnitude than anything we've had in the past. Pam and Dustin, for me this is central to your discussion about a golden age: it can happen for travel media if we learn to really use maps. In fact, the age of digital media can probably be more golden for travel than it is for any other genre, because when you compare iTunes for audio to Google Maps for travel, it's clear where the most innovation and the greatest possibilities lie.
Very true. Editors are easily forgotten, but in some cases they're more important now than they were in the past, while storytellers try to find their feet with new mediums. When somebody starts on a VoiceMap, we assign an editor immediately, and they guide the users through the process of working with location-aware audio. It's a medium with all sorts of peculiarities, just like a novel or news story, but because we've been consuming print since childhood, we've internalised most of its rules.
It's also important to recognise that editors aren't just pedantic grammarians, reworking a story to meet a standard. They're the original curators, responsible for the distribution of stories -- as well as being storytellers themselves, of course. Googlezon EPIC 2014 is still the gold standard for this, even if it's from way back in 2007. Skip to 7:18 for the bit about editors.
My approach is simple: recognise that everything has a past, present and future, be it a bar in your neighbourhood, a village in the deepest Amazon or, perhaps most importantly, you. Try to be as aware of that as you can, and you can start with raw geography and find compelling stories everywhere.
This is the first time I've shared a VoiceMap walk here, and if you click through, you'll notice a price tag. Don't be deterred: you can access all the text and some of the audio without paying, and the price tag is really for people who want to go out and do the walk using our mobile apps.
If anybody is in LA and interested in doing exactly that, let me know. I have a few copies to give away.
Interesting, but the phrase "digital is not a phase" sounds like something from 1995.
A place to share things like this. Because I can't swear that it is good stuff.