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Analysis: Welcome to Pine Point, pt 2c

Here is (hopefully) the final installment in my analysis of Welcome to Pine Point. (pt 1, pt 2a, pt 2b)

chapter five: Shelf Life

On the opening page of this chapter, the text reads:

I’m bothered by the last line:

Who can relate to an entire town closing except people whose town has closed?

What does the narrator mean by this question? And what is its intent? While I’d like to read it as an introduction to the next two pages in the chapter, when two Pine Pointers discuss leaving Pine Point, that’s not the immediate effect. I read the question as another example of the narrator positioning people in Pine Point as exotic others that we (the users) can gaze upon and learn about. We, because we can’t relate to them (but who says everyone who might read/view that “we” can’t relate?), are different from people in Pine Point. Not sure if this makes sense?

chapter six: What’s Weird

On the opening page of this chapter, there is an unidentified (and disembodied) voice discussing how it’s weird to think about Pine Point not existing anymore. On the page is a split screen with two sets of footage: on the left is Pine Point 1987, with various buildings, on the right is Pine Point 2009, with barren fields. It’s a powerful page, made even more powerful by the haunting music in the background.

chapter seven: Remains

This chapter discusses how losing the town meant it never changes—it can’t, it’s gone. This allows Pine Pointers to not just remember it, but memorialize it as a wonderful place, where nothing bad happened.

This text seems to be the answer to the question that open the entire documentary:

This chapter also introduces the “big surprise”/twist of the story (which I won’t reveal here).

chapter eight: One for the Road

On the final page of the interactive documentary, the narrator wonders:

Then, he answers:

This passage fits the overall tone/mood of this interactive documentary. Again, it positions the narrator (and us, I think?) as forever distanced from the Pine Pointers. We will never know how they feel/what they felt—we can’t understand—because their experiences are too different from ours. What would this story look like if he had asked Pine Pointers if they were happier? If there were (more) accounts (or, because it’s an interactive documentary, opportunities for them to share their stories online) of their responses to this question.

I deeply enjoyed this interactive documentary and count it as one of my big inspirations, so my critical questions aren’t meant to devalue or dismiss it. I think my persistent questions about the narrator and how they position themselves (and us) as distanced from the subjects of the story come out of my own struggles to figure out how I want to position myself as a narrator in the farm project.

Analysis: Welcome to Pine Point, pt 2a

In a previous post, I offered a general overview analysis of Welcome to Pine Point. In this post, I’ll provide more specific details and discussion about what I find useful and inspiring in this interactive documentary.

Screen Shot 2013-09-19 at 12.29.03 PM — Intro

Storytelling: I like the intro as a narrative about how/why this project about Pine Point came to be: Creator (Mike Simmons) describes his limited experience in Pine Point—visiting there once as a kid—and how an encounter with a website, dedicated to remembering Pine Point, enabled him to reflect on both his own memories of living as a teenager through the 70s/80s and the individual and collective memories of teenagers in Pine Point (PinePointers).

I’d like to include my own narrative as part of the intro to the farm project. It seems important to set the context, trace the history of the project and explain my reasons for why I’ve created the project.

Design: I really like the use of background video in the intro. It’s video that sets a mood, without telling a specific story. I particularly like the use of it in the very first page. It starts with some grainy/shaky footage of a field. Then slowly, (seemingly) handwritten text appears on the screen with the question, “Imagine your hometown never changed…would it be so bad?” I like this opening question and how it gets me thinking about change, hometowns, nostalgia, memory and growing older. Unfortunately the question only lasts on the screen for a few seconds before animation begins and the project title emerges. How are you supposed to read and think through the question so quickly? Why bother asking the question at all if you don’t provide users with enough time/space to reflect on the question?

I’d like to include questions throughout my project. And I’d like to borrow from their visual style here by using background footage with text layered over it. But I want these questions to serve as an opportunity for thinking, reflecting and processing. So I want them to stay on the screen longer: either have the text last longer or provide users with ability to pause the screen.

Sound: Throughout Welcome to Pine Point, there is background music. Oftentimes it is an instrumental score, but occasionally it also includes relevant sound effects (e.g.: glasses clinking, people having fun on the page about how PinePointers seemed to be “holding a decades-long party.”)

I’d like to use sound in my project. Not sure how to do that since the sound I have from past footage isn’t the greatest. I know that I want to use a lot of Room 34’s music (in fact, I already have).

Chapter One: Town

In Welcome to Pine Point, Mike Simmons (who is half of the creative team, the Googles, who created this doc), inserts his own narrative, which doesn’t always “fit,” beside the story of Pine Point. For example, in the chapter “Town,” the first 2 pages offer a brief description of the town and its demise. The next page is a brief story about how Simmons decided to visit Pine Point again, but stopped in his old Northern Canada hometown first.

In later chapters, he also inserts himself into the story. I’m not sure how I feel about this. I like the idea of his story being a part of the project and I like that he mixes it in with the other stories. But his interjections also establish him as the author/ity in this story; he is our guide and who we turn to for information, interesting facts and meaning. With his limited connection to the town, having only visited there once, why is he the authority? Why not the creator of the website, Pine Point Revisited?

I’d like to insert my self in my farm project stories. But, I want to leave (a lot of) room for other voices to serve as authors/authorities in my project. How to do that? That’s a huge question, one I’ve been grappling with ever since I began working on the farm project, way back in 2001.

Wow, this analysis is raising some great questions for me, but it’s also taking a lot of time. I guess I need to turn it into a few blog posts.

Telling a story

In various discussions about their interactive documentary, Welcome to Pine Point, the Goggles (creative team of Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge) emphasize the importance of linear (as in, beginning, middle, end) storytelling. In an interview with Nieman Storyboard they argue:

The thing for us that we’re happiest with is that we stuck to what linear “narrative” has done for so long: that beginning, middle and end. Because we stuck with that, that’s the thing that worked the best for us. People want to be told stories, they want to be engaged.

When people think of digital interactive media, one of the first things they say is “It’s going to have multiple entry points, and you can go wherever you want to.” And sure, you can deliver certain kinds of information like that, but it’s not super-great for stories, at least in our experience. You can skip ahead, if you want to, you can go four chapters ahead, but you can also do that with a book.

We’re hoping that we’re keeping people engaged and keeping each section as interesting as possible. For us, I think that was the key. We had to break it into chunks, because that’s how it had to go. We wanted people to be engaged, so using media like writing meant that you have to read it to experience it. You could flip through it and kind of experience it, but if you don’t read it, you’re not really getting engaged.

The Goggles

And in their manifesto, they explain:

Sure, in Pine Point you can skip ahead, in the same way you can fast forward a movie or skip to the end of a book, but there are dozens of little things that we employed to keep you moving forward, one spread at a time. The simple Previous and Next buttons, for instance, give some reassurance that there’s no other path, no up or down, or diagonal. The content that does allow you to drill down is contextualized in the page – a pile of photos, a series of videos, with reassuring numbers and controls.

The Goggles

The Goggles believe that a linear story, with a clear path from beginning to middle to end, compels the user, inspiring them to come along on the narrative journey. The Goggles see the role of the storyteller as the tour guide that leads you through the story, pointing out interesting things along the way.

As a user experiencing Pine Point, I must admit that the linear aspect of the narrative was my least favorite part of the experience. I can appreciate that a clear path might give some users “reassurance” or comfort that they are reading/watching it the “right” way or that their storytelling guide is trustworthy. But, I felt that it restricted my ability to explore and be curious about Pine Point and all of the stories/documents/photos. And I’m not so sure that being reassured that we are reading the story the right way or that we can uncritically trust our storytelling guide should always be the goal. Their model seems to reinforce the idea of a Storyteller who tells a story to a passive/listening audience who sits back and is dazzled and entranced by the storyteller’s tales. Do users have an opportunity to participate in the process?

Additionally, I’m struck by the Goggles limited reading of storytelling as always being linear and working best with a beginning, middle and end. I’m reminded of Ursula K. LeGuin’s wonderful essay, What Makes a Story. In it she writes:

A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end:” This comes from Aristotle, and it splendidly describes a great many stories from the European narrative tradition, but it doesn’t describe all stories. It’s a recipe for steak, it’s not a recipe for tamales. The three-part division is typically European, and I would say that it’s also typically European in putting emphasis on the end — on where the story goes, what you get to.

Ursula LeGuin

Yes! I like this idea that linear stories are useful and valuable, but they aren’t the only way to tell a “good” (as in compelling, effective, engaging, entertaining, inspiring, interesting, provocative, educational) story. What other story forms can we draw on when working on interactive documentaries?

In her essay, LeGuin wonders about shifting away from storytelling time (especially progression of time: begin here, end here) and towards storytelling space. She imagines the story as a house, with different rooms to explore and windows to look out of, onto imaginary landscapes. I want to think more about the story as a house; it’s a powerful metaphor that seems fitting to use in my stories about the Farm as a home space.

Stories and the trouble with GRAND narratives

I am troubled by GRAND narratives and BIG stories. I’ve written about my trouble with them on my blog in several different posts. Today, having recently read Douglas Rushkoff’s chapter, “Narrative Collapse” in Present Shock, I’m compelled to revisit my arguments and expand on them. It seems like a useful exercise since I’m in the process of trying to articulate my own vision/version of storytelling and my own tentative answers to the questions: Why do I tell stories? and How do I tell them?

Here’s an overview of some of my critiques:

The Existential Crisis

In a brief video interview, Ken Burns offers the following explanation for why we tell stories:

We tell stories to continue ourselves. We all think an exception is going to be made in our case, and we’re going to live forever. And being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that that’s not going to be. Story is there to just remind us that it’s just okay.

Sara Puotinen

And here’s my response in my post, Why do we tell stories?:

Burns offers a compelling vision of the storyteller, but it is about the Storyteller-as-Self with a capital S who skillfully crafts narratives (that lie and manipulate in hopefully productive, meaningful and complicated ways, says Burns in the video) that convince us that it’s okay to die. I want to imagine the storyteller as a different sort of self who crafts stories that provide comfort and meaning to more than themselves, but to and with their communities. And who shares stories that aren’t aimed at dealing with impending death, but with finding ways to help us make sense of and (hopefully) flourish in our lives.

Sara Puotinen

In revisiting my statement, I’d like to question my use of the word “comfort.” I like stories that provide meaning and that encourage people to be curious about those ideas and experiences that they take for granted or that they ignore. These types of stories aren’t necessarily comfortable or comforting, but they can be inspiring, thought-provoking and catalyzing.

The need for coherent, unifying narratives

In my post, on stories, sharing, and the trouble with coherent narratives, I discuss Jake Barton’s video on the importance of collaborative storytelling. He argues that collectively constructing a unifying narrative is important for providing us with meaning and binds us together. As an example, he describes the power of the moon landing to bring the world together in a collective celebration of how “we did it.”

I argue that this push for a unifying narrative can actually flatten out differences and erase the social and political contexts in which those differences actually matter:

Such a claim seems to erase all of the politics behind who the “we” was that actually did it (the U.S.) and for what purposes (at least partially, to beat Russia and claim U.S. superiority in space and everything else). I don’t know that much about the space race in the 60s, but I do know that it took place in the context of the Cold War, an extreme fear of Russia and communism and the vigilant practice of an Us versus Them mentality. Even if we accept, in a broader sense, that the fact that someone (anyone) was able to travel to the moon meant something to us-as-humans, what do we make of what happens not too long after Neil Armstrong took his historic step onto the moon, when he and Buzz Aldrin planted a U.S. Flag on the surface? What does the planting of the U.S. flag mean for a common, coherent narrative about Us?

My point in posing these questions is to trouble the idea that sharing and collaborating on stories brings us together by erasing our differences and reminding us that we are, ultimately, all the same. I like hearing stories that resonate with me and that enable me to see how my experiences can be similar to others. And some stories that I hear do prompt me to think, “wow, we aren’t all that different.” But, sharing and collaborating on stories does not require that we erase/ignore/suppress our differences or the political context in which those differences come to matter. The realization that differences matter does not mean that we can’t connect, share, collaborate or get along with others. It means that those connections shouldn’t demand that we create a singular narrative of commonality.

Sara Puotinen

My (leading) questions: Do we need one unifying narrative? Can we find ways to be bound together (or to connect) that involve taking seriously and embracing our different experiences and perspectives and by sharing multiple stories?

In my post, Beware of the Single Story, I bring an editorial in the New York Times by Steve Almond in conversation with Chimamanda Adichie’s video talk, The danger of a single story. First I argue:

I’m troubled by Almond’s refusal (or failure) to discuss the damaging effects that Grand Stories/Unified Narratives by a Narrator have had on all of us and our understandings of other perspectives and experiences. Yes, “narration represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning.” However, this meaning is not singular and should not be revealed or articulated by any single Storyteller.

Sara Puotinen

And then I pose the question: Can we build off of Adichie’s brilliant storytelling about the dangers of a single story to imagine ways of creating meaning that aren’t predicated on just one story or one Narrator?

Why tell stories?

People craft, collect and share stories for all sorts of reasons. To create reflections of themselves that haven’t previously existed. To imagine worlds where anything is possible. My grandmother Ines told funny stories about working on a farm and living in Amasa to experience and share joy with others. My mother Judy told stories about the farm to establish herself as a Puotinen and to honor the family that had nurtured and supported her. I tell stories to stay connected, to not forget the spaces and people who have helped shape me and to engage in the difficult work of figuring out the best ways to contribute to the legacy of past generations.

I also tell stories because I am compelled to do so. I use the process of collecting and crafting stories, and the deep engagement that that requires, to make sense of who I have been/am becoming and of my relationship to others and the larger world. And I use that process to pay attention to and take seriously the lives of the people in my stories.