Digital Storytelling, Or Why Technology Has Ruined Everything

By Felicia Rose Chavez, Colorado College

Editor’s Note: Felicia presented an extended version of this speech, together with a reading of her creative work, at Colorado College in March, 2017. One of our StoryCenter collaborators Heather Goucher was in the audience, and she asked Felicia for a copy. The speech frames “digital storytelling” more broadly than we do in our workshops, and we’re happy to share a portion of it now, with hopes it will inspire our readers.

Last week I’m at a party and this guy—white hair, collared shirt tucked into his jeans—asks what I do for a living. I say I’m a writing professor. He gives me this big dramatic groan. “I sure feel sorry for you,” he says. “Kids nowadays can’t write two words. All this technology? It’s ruined them! They break all the rules.” I nod as he goes on and on about improperly formatted student emails. (It turns out that he’s a professor, too, of Religious Studies.) “And don’t get me started on their essays,” he says. “Well, YOU know what I mean!”

And I want to play along, I really do, because this is a party and as a mother of a four-year-old, I never get to go to parties. I just wanna wear my lipstick and drink my drink and disengage. But instead of agreeing with Email Etiquette Guy, I cringe. “Yeaaaah,” I say. “I think I’m part of the problem.”

I teach digital storytelling, which means that I guide writers to creatively and critically engage voice, sound, language, and image. I assign podcasts like Two Dope Queens, television shows like Black Mirror, and rappers like Jay Z, in an effort to afford inspiration outside of traditional texts.

I embrace technology in the college writing classroom because, as a professional writer, I know the market. I know that every day, art is becoming less and less static. Audio essays and documentaries; films; photo essays; graphic novels; spoken word poetry; art installations; blogs; hip hop albums; stand-up comedy—these tools and techniques define whole new paradigms of expression. My writing students should engage with multidimensional mediums, not only because it’s fun, but because it’s essential to their lifelong literacy. Technology’s here to stay.

That scares a lot of people, and I totally get it. Anxiety about technology has a long-documented history. Plato thought the act of writing was a step backward for truth. Martin Luther decried the first bound books. Leo Tolstoy criticized the printing press. The New York Times claimed that the telephone would turn us into transparent heaps of jelly. The radio was a menace; the cinema was a fad; the computer had no market; and the television was nothing more than a plywood box. The backlash is persistent.

I know I’m guilty. There are days when I want to smack people over the head with their selfie sticks. But reconceived, digital storytelling is an ancient movement—a movement rooted in oral storytelling. Collecting and preserving stories, both then and now, was never just about communication; it’s about engaging in community. Storytelling is our participatory democracy. Why wouldn’t I want to encourage my students’ contributions?

On the first day of class, I ask students what they’re into, and they tell me they’re obsessed with some comedian or band that I’ve never heard of, and so I put them on the reading list. Each class gets a customized database of multimedia texts. Students choose their own reading assignments, studying artistic techniques that are relevant to their individual projects. The students profit from passion, and I learn something new.

By actively engaging students in their own education, I affirm that art belongs to everyone. In my Creative Nonfiction class we craft artist books, rich with visual metaphor; in my Audio Essay class we sample podcasts to teach our writing how to speak; in my Creative Writing Laboratory class we make silent films and fake websites, and wild hybrid art that defies categorization.

And it’s not just the art forms that are evolving. The ways in which art is distributed, workshopped, and preserved is changing, too. Students perform spoken word off their iPhones, and file share on Google Drive, and audio record their workshop critiques. A few years ago, I asked a student why she didn’t take notes during class, and she looked at me like I was 100 years old. “I took a picture of the board,” she said. Now I take a picture of the board, too, after my own improvised lectures.

I learn from my students all the time. To you teachers out there, if you’re hesitant about incorporating technology into your curriculum, you don’t need to be an expert; trust that your students are way ahead of you. Empower them to exercise their expertise.

In creative writing there’s a cliché: write what you know. And while that’s solid advice, I advocate that students write what they like—the weirder the better. Let everyone else imitate and obey, molding their art to satisfy the workshop. I want my students to make the stuff that excites them or comforts them or affirms their existence, the stuff they seek out in their sweatpants and glasses when they need to shut out the stress and binge on potato chips. Maybe they’re fireside, cradling a cup of Earl Grey and that yellowed copy of their favorite poems. More likely they’re splayed on the couch with easy access to a laptop, Kindle, or smart phone.

Like it or not, a contemporary relationship with art is filtered through the lens of technology. Whether it’s posting pictures on Facebook, nit picking Steven King on Goodreads, or engaging in mobile justice by video recording a police officer pulling a gun on a civilian, our documentation qualifies us as digital storytellers. We know how to do it without even trying.

So let’s make the work that we want to enjoy. Let’s do it for fun, or do it for survival, but let’s do it unapologetically. Because most people will expect us to apologize, just like Email Etiquette Guy. He’ll say, “You can’t write.” He’ll say, “Technology has ruined you.” And most dangerous of all, he’ll say, “You can’t break the rules.”

Email Etiquette Guy is emblematic of that centuries-old technological pushback, figureheads who think that pushing the boundaries is blasphemy, demanding relevancy is overindulgence, and supplementing with contemporary works is an affront to authority. All the while we’re just doing our thing, making our art, spearheading a creative revolution.

So, I ask my students, why are we such a threat? I’ll tell you why. In fact, I’ll give you five whys. Number One: We’re a threat because we sanctify entertainment. Egalitarian access to art-making means that art has ditched its elitist standards. As a result, it’s no longer real. Have you ever heard someone say that? “That’s not real art.” More and more my colleagues debate what is good and bad art, what is reproduced here in this fat anthology that costs a lot of money and makes teaching really easy, and what flickers on a screen. Digital storytelling, especially, is branded entertainment, a lowbrow pastime. Of course this discourse makes me want to toe the line in my own creative practice. Because if I deny myself the impulse to write out of fear of making “bad” art, I never would have conceived of many of my nonfiction projects.

Number Two: We’re a threat because we contaminate the English language. In college I was an English major, where standard classroom procedure amounted to an overpriced Search and Find: “What’s working in this piece? Okay, now imitate the technique.” I never expressed how isolating this felt, how overwhelming, because what wasn’t working in Keats or Eliot or Shakespeare? And why was I to imitate a voice that wasn’t mine? In my own classroom, I make it a point to acknowledge marginalized identity politics and embrace the fluidity of language, working with students to develop their own authentic voices.

Number Three: We’re a threat because we defy the publishing gatekeepers. Which brings me directly to Number Four: We’re a threat because we diversify the literary landscape. As a person of color, my MFA program taught me one thing. I don’t belong in books. My writing was too angry. My writing was too exotic. My writing wasn’t exotic enough. My writing made readers feel left out. My writing made readers feel guilty. And you better believe I’d cry in the bathroom after a workshop, and then go home and submit my writing anyway. I submitted to all of the best magazines—and got rejected from all of them, too.

Then I got pregnant and spent two years crying in the bathroom about motherhood instead of writing. When I emerged back on the literary scene, it was like I had tornado-ed into Technicolor fantasy. Friends of mine ran their own literary journals, and self-published e-books and zines. Online journals now solicited work from people of color, and not just for the “special” annual anthology. New media was a catchphrase I didn’t have to apologetically explain in my cover letters. I stepped away, and the world caught up. This isn’t to say that the contemporary publishing world is faultless in regards to artistic outliers, but it is easier nowadays for us to find our tribe.

And finally, Number Five: We’re a threat because we empower others to share their stories. Back in my 20s I founded a webzine called GirlSpeak. The magazine’s motto was: “Our voice is power, our art is activism.” And even though the webzine is now defunct, I still abide by that philosophy both in perspective and practice.

I’m not here to just exercise the storytelling muscle. I’m here to perform a pointed catharsis, to use art as a catalyst for something specific that I want to expose or expunge. My latest audio documentary, Electroshock, is a years-long passion project. The documentary offers voice to three women who have undergone electroshock therapy: Polly, a 75-year-old housewife; Anita, a 52-year-old minister; and Barbara, a 44-year-old nurse. I sought to educate listeners about the physical, emotional, and psychological ramifications of electroshock, and these women were brave enough to join me in that journey, sharing intimate details they’d never told anyone before. This was a hard project. This was a dark project. But the impetus—our voice is power, our art is activism—sustained me, as it did Polly and Anita and Barbara.

In conclusion, I say be a threat. Break the rules. Be relevant and real, vulnerable and wise. Now more than ever, it’s a writer’s responsibility to push back with a public voice. The more we rally and resist, the more resilient we become, and resilience breeds power. Community breeds power. Volume breeds power.

Toni Cade Bambara has this great quote,“Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges.” Can you feel it? Literary concepts are shifting all around us. It’s unstable ground. Let’s turn on our power and invent new work. After all, we can always Google the proper way to format an email.