Abstract
Drawing from her 30 years as an adviser, commentator, critic, and occasional participant in the Washington, D.C. policy community, the author explores the notion that the escalating brevity of contemporary social messaging, including that generated by professional messaging from news organizations, political groups, and popular culture providers has created new story-telling paradigms as well as new ways of understanding “story,” per se. The significance of this, she argues based on her own original research, is the heightened vulnerability of visual (and linguistic) “memes” to hijacking by political extremists across the ideological continuum, as well as the impoverishment of cultural empathy on which healthy democratic structures must depend. She examines the efficacy of “single frame storytelling,” illustrated by the more violent aspects of white nationalist movements such as those which erupted during protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and relates them to the idea of “optics” in the mainstream political world. Finally, she provides two book-ended examples of how contemporary social media and online technology can be used as storytelling platforms in the future, one exemplified by the final assignment for her 2018 University Honors program class and the other based on her own current work in ethnographic theatre.
Presenters
Kerric HarveyAssociate Professor, School of Media and Public Affairs and the Film Studies Program, George Washington University, District of Columbia, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Online Storytelling, Political Imagination, Narrative Forms
Digital Media
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