Post 2: MultiModal Media
Something that I have pondered over ever since the final project was assigned was this term “multimodal.” And as the dictionary, rather helpfully, provides “having more than one mode,” I suppose I’m on my own to solve this puzzle. What I’ve tried to do with this blog is to be multimodal in style and content, and by that, I mean I’ve tried to use multiple styles of discourse including text, hypertext, video, and audio. And if that’s the definition, then I believe I’ve succeeded.
So what?
Does writing a piece of multi-modal discourse help my students? How does this apply to what they can accomplish within the 103 classroom? Well, the short answer to that last question is that it universally applies to what they can accomplish. In 103, we are encouraging our students to form arguments and write in multiple literacies, and projects that are multimodal in nature reflect that. I’ve tried to show my students multiple examples of multimodal literature, ranging from creative advertisements to movie trailers, and I think that they get the idea. But what I wanted to do with this blog post was look at some of my personal favorite examples.
I am becoming increasingly fascinated with how people tell stories. I’m an avid reader of Neil Gaiman, and I appreciate the way that he describes himself as a storyteller first, comic book writer and novelist second. His work absolutely reflects that idea, and I completely respect it. Telling stories is an important part of nearly all human cultures, and I find it especially interesting to see how that has changed in the digital age, where we have what amounts to a kind of interactive storytelling. This interactive storytelling may take many different forms, but the two that I have the most experience with are ARGs and videoblog storylines.
The ARG that I played was part of an advertising campaign for the movie A.I. It turned into a wide-ranging and very addictive online game. I still remember the strange feeling of receiving a recorded phone message from one of the game characters, and helping solve the clues that advanced the game to its final conclusion. The trailer was posted on Aintitcool.com and within a couple days, a Yahoo Group had been formed (I read in the group for a few days before joining, but was still among the first to really take part, joining within a week of its creation), and a few other web sites had been created for those of us attempting to solve the murder of Evan Chan. The site Cloudmakers.org provides a detailed analysis of the game itself and how it all went down. But it all started with a mysterious credit in the first trailer for the film A.I., where they listed a phone number and the rather odd credit for a “Sentient Machine Therapist” named Jeanine Salla, and the search was on.
While I’ve spent some time in my classroom discussing inventive forms of advertising as a method of rhetoric, this Alternate Reality Game devised by the promoters of A.I. changed the way web advertising worked. And while the game rarely even touched on the events of the movie, it did take place within the film’s world, and it helped build word of mouth and excitement for the film. It also was successful on another front, as the game company that created “The Beast” (as the A.I. game was later known) were also preparing to release an ARG of their own, that would require participants to pay to play. But I think what interested me most in this project was how it was so involving for the audience, and it really felt like what we were doing was changing the story. And according to the puppetmasters of the game, we actually were. As an answer to the question on how significantly the players changed the game, the puppetmasters responded:
Tons. Players spotting typos were responsible for two entire characters (Jeanine’s crabby AI and the elusive Jason Fertors). Players spotting a re-used stock photo forced us to write The Step-Self thread.
Players also voted with their interests. The Red King was a random GK flunky as outlined and wasn’t supposed to be mentioned past the first week. But the web developers threw in a cool sound file on the Shado Paj, the players reacted, and a star was born! (The down side being of course, that we had to rewrite the story each time RK had a part.)
We had a variety of ideas about how the Loki problem might get solved, none of which involved a dream database, but once it was there, what a resource!
Our original plan for the game was quite different from the final product, which was written on the fly (in between marathon bug fixing-sessions and orange juice binging). That wonderfully dynamic interplay is entirely due to the players.
I just think that is incredibly cool, and it really opens up a lot of paths for true multimodal storytelling. I’m not sure how it can be adapted within the realms of a classroom, but it does make for an interesting study.
Over the last year or two, another example of online interactive storytelling has taken youtube and the current web-going community by storm, and that is the story of LonelyGirl15. What started out as seemingly another in the long line of teenage videobloggers on Youtube evolved into a video series of over 370 episodes, each adding to a story involving a terrifying cult and some innocent teenagers trying to escape it. This story took on a life of its own as viewers started noticing small clues in the videos that this wasn’t actually a real girl, and that there were some pretty strange things on the walls of her typical teenage room, including shrines to Aleister Crowley and various other symbols. As Bree explained her situation in regards to her religion, strange things started happening to her in regards to a ceremony she would need to be a part of. The forums of the site had people trying to figure out more and more info related to the show, as well as the ARG spinoff, until the finale of season one when Bree was killed by The Order.
Similar to the A.I. game, the audience influenced the direction of the video through their interactions with Bree’s Youtube account and the forums at lg15.com. All of it added up to an exciting interactive storytelling experience.
These are just a couple of interesting examples of how the internet can be an almost limitless tool in the realm of storytelling. And what is even more interesting for the 103 instructor is that these ideas can be translated into the field of argument and rhetoric, especially with the development of an online writing and blogging community.
[…] -MultiModal Media This post will deal with the varying aspects of multimodal media, and how our students can use the many tools available to them on the web to creatively engage in multimodal rhetoric. […]
Pingback by BevillBlog | December 12, 2007
Hey buddy, we deal with multi-modal media all the time in my PhD program. The CS definition is a media with which a person interacts with in various ways. For example, the new Microsoft Surface is multi-modal because it supports a bunch of different means of interaction (object tracking, multi-touch, gesture recognition, etc.). SOCOM for the PS2 is also multi-modal because it supports both the gamepad and speech at the same time.
There’s a ton of cool multi-modal technologies out there that have been developed for multi-modal story telling. Here’s a weird one from Singapore:
http://www.mixedrealitylab.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=36
Comment by David Smith | January 18, 2008
Awesome stuff, Dave. That Magic Land thing reminds me a lot of the virtual world in Ender’s Game, just a completely interactive environment. I like it. Thanks for the comment!
Comment by Scott | January 18, 2008