15-20 Minute Paper
Dana Coester
Assistant Professor
PI Reed School of Journalism
West Virginia University
Biography
Coester’s work focuses on community media and technology disruption. Her research examines the future of storytelling with special interests in mobile behavior and experiments in new narrative forms at the intersection of digital storytelling and neuroscience.
Abstract
The presentation is in part poetic performance interwoven with research that examines a three-decade path of experimenting with fragmented narratives in both art and journalism forms under the influence of John Anderson’s “The Spreading Activation branching, associative, impressionistic model of memory, set me on a collision path with technology disruption in my field and compelled me to envision a new kind of journalism that performs in digital space in ways that approximate brain space. These multimedia digital narrative experiments served to reframe journalism as a system that should operate as narrative networks rather than narrative sequences. In this series of work that bridges journalism, art installation and documentary forms, I looked to neuroscience to describe, not brain maps, but “experience networks” with parallels in digital storytelling and that sets the narrative stage for augmented reality.
“…it was part of the revolution at hand. And it freed our stories from their constraints. Our stories were unraveling…”
Looking to neuroscience also illuminated the potential inherent flexibility and stability in the experiential — or as I imagined — the reverberatory story. As noted by Anderson, “Note that this scheme allows activation to reverberate back…Contrary to many people’s intuitions, these reverberatory possibilities do not change expectations about a stable pattern of activation.” I suggest these reverberatory possibilities have implications for harnessing complex, real-time social narratives in digital space, in particular with emerging wearable technology and immersive, transparent augmented reality forms.