For another blog post in my head about non content course videos, I had a memory jaunt back to a pivotal experience amongst many when I got to attend South by Southwest Interactive in– gulp doing the time math– 2008. This was a keynote session featuring two media narrative giants- Steven Johnson and Henry Jenkins. Pivotal in what I recall hearing but also that the sessions was a conversation between two colleagues sitting in arm chairs on stage.
Side note: I keep conjuring a blog post about my long path through digital storytelling, my story of storytelling, and it gets so long in my head that I can see piecing together from separate posts, which I am now tagging here as storystory. This plan may go nowhere.
The thing I took away was how they framed the social media that shaped me- television, and how the shows Lost and Wired which were “new” in 2008, were smashing to formula of episodes of stand along stories that began and ended in 30 or 60 minute chunks, for a plot structure that was larger, more complex, ore organic.
I checked my blog notes and indeed I had a blog post! But I went to look at at, and it seemed so skimpy… all text, maybe 2 links, one fuzzy photo.
I mean who really cares if I have an 18 year old skimpy blog post? Me! I have had a thing when I find older posts of doing a bit of quick cleanup, fixing broken links, adding missing ones, doing a better job of categorizing — the bulk of my posts, 3270 of them, are in a default blog pile category as for many years I just lobbed them on the pile. Also, a vast majority of my posts lack decent featured images because in the theme I ran for a lon stretch, it grabbed the first image in a post for the front page view, but mostly did not define them natively in WordPress as feature images.
Now it looks and links more and better
plus it includes some update notes at the end. The big thing that happened was I had but one photo in the post, one I took from the audience likely with a low resolution pocket Canon camera. I thought and expected I had more in my flickr stream, and I did! Notable I had a few of the visual notes that were done there live by someone who signed the corner as Brightspot Interactive Design… an ad a URL to a blog eyescience.blogspot.com Thar be an invisible link I can make, and the blog still exists! Why, I dunno, but I do care.
There I see this was the work of Sunni Brown who did move to her own domain (still there, and another day for exploring there). But back on that blogspot and because I can follow the sidebar links to posts for March 2008 the month when SXSWi happened, I can find the full image of the graphic notes.
Here’s where it got interesting, seeing the posts/visual notes from other main sessions:
- Frank Warren and the PostSecret Project – I remember this one it was a fantastic example of analog meets digital / real storytelling — and in 2026, 18 years later, it’s still going strong.
- Jane McGonigal – yes, this was another session I remember well, AvantGames and all, virtual reality.
I had noted these as well as other sessions I saw in one longer conference post- including I am rpetty sure the first time I saw Kathy Sierra speak.
But back on the Sunni Brown notes, I saw a keynote from someone who’s session was so not memorable I did not mention it. Maybe the guy went nowhere:
- Mark Zuckerberg Keynote – I wonder if I went, bit reading the post, I do remember the booing of the moderator, though I am not sure for what. So this session registers little memory cells, even then the dude gave me the creeps
In fact the only sign of this was a tshirt I snapped a picture of- y’all remmeber all the “poking”?
I can’t explain why I spent a chunk of time digging around and updating an 18 year olf blog post. Sure If I want to just generate a memory, I can ask a machine for a summary of the Jenkins / Johnson session, but I’d rather rekindle and reconnect my own lived experiences.
Because their talk did fire up the idea in my of complex web narratives, of getting beyond “stories” as a listing of events or even a single thread. It was part of the path I was on in pushing and playing with web based storytelling.
And more… I was there. This was easily one of the most exciting conference experiences I had, and stands out far from the mundane education ones I spent most of my time at. All of the sessions were panels, discussions, not talking over pictures of text.
Plus they had a huge open corner space in the conference space with one of the biggest piles of legos strewn about I have ever seen, leading someone to take time to express themselves:
That was the long ago then, and now the blog post is that much better. I only have about 3000 more to update.
Featured Image: A mashup of the smashed TV form Blow Up Your TV plus a snag of a poster from eBay, all collaged together by me and not JenAI, and pretty much illegal use of images. Sue me.
