Internal Affairs

I just had to leave an extremely well done workshop titled "Digital Storytelling" led by Nora Paul, the director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota. I had to leave early to get out to the ballpark for tonight, but I wanted to add a quick post first.

The two points that really stood out to me:
-Remember teachers saying "Show, don't tell" when you are describing something or someone in writing? The workshop largely featured the same type of thinking. It was a collection of Web sites that went to great lengths to give more than the story and photos. This was done through the difference between multimedia and multiple medias, in which multimedia syncs together various forms of entertainment. Really, think video game meets news article and you have the concept laid out in the most basic way.

-Speaking of video games, Paul talked briefly on how her son reacted to what she considered to be a fairly revolutionary article as far as interaction was concerned. Her gamer son was less than impressed. This got me thinking to myself and my fellow interns. We are the first generation who has grown up in the online age, and we are the most media savvy generation ever. The scary thing is, we will be quickly displaced from that titled by the generations below us.

This means a lot of the "figuring out where we fit" currently underway by journalists as a whole will be done by us. This is both an exciting and terrifying concept. We have an understanding of where the "real world" and digital world meet better than anyone before us. It is up to us and journalists like us across the country to define that line in the media for the rest of the world.

Bring it.

I hope the other interns were as excited by that as I was, and hopefully they can add some follow up posts, to better define what I'm talking about. In the mean time, I've gotta run. Sammy is calling me!