More Thoughts on Multimedia Stories

In addition to each story’s unique collection of video and other media, inside the Atavist apps they have what we call inline content: maps, timelines, character lists, primary documents, and links. You can turn on the inline content to find out what’s behind the story, or leave it off to read completely distraction-free. We think each of our narratives will make a great read, regardless of whether you read it on a Kindle or in our own app.

I know we're going to do a case study of Atavist in class, but I wanted to raise a quick issue on the heels of my apparent lack of reading comprehension/understanding of the context of our stories for this week. The above quote comes from the About Us section of Atavist website. It is this particular explanation of their mission where I run into mental blocks, and the questions that result aren't limited to this site in particular: everybody is struggling to figure out what digital narratives or multimedia stories mean and I admire that Atavist is one of the startups daring to play around with new storytelling.

My problem: There are different levels of "adding" features to a text. Tacking on pictures or video to a story after the fact is one thing. (I think what has traditionally been done.) In these cases, you could take away the pictures or other enhancements without affecting the story, the text, at all.

Then there's what I understand people like the writers at Atavist to be doing: creating stories that integrate multimedia into their texts, as essential parts to telling that story. An effort to expand the dimensions of stories. This is new and it's incredibly difficult to do right now. Therefore, it's not always going to work.

Here's the crux of my misunderstanding: I don't think Atavist can, as they want to above, have it both ways. You can't have specially constructed experiments of multimedia text on the one hand, then pull those multimedia elements out and call it "distraction-free" on the other. While it might be a savvy marketing move for readers who aren't ready to embrace new media, it doesn't make sense.

If the writer did a good job including the video, audio, etc., then it needs to be in the story. Taking it out would leave the story incomplete, just like the best stories are written to the absolute bone.

Furthermore, it follows that if multimedia features can be edited out and the story still works, then it's not multimedia storytelling in the first place.

Supposing we have a well-crafted multimedia story, then offering it in a chopped up, text-only version does a disservice by editing it that way--those same editors probably wouldn't, to find some (probably bad) analogy, edit out space breaks to conserve page room or because people didn't like the looks of them. By distorting the form (and content, really), you're distorting the story. More specifically, by offering readers/customers a distorted form--perhaps pandering to their more traditional reading preferences--you're not doing the story, or your mission to be a new dynamic, digital genre, justice.

I don't say all this to unfairly criticize Atavist's choice to offer both Kindle and iPad formats, but to think more broadly about what digital publishing and we as potential multimedia storytellers still need to learn and consider moving forward. We're all still figuring this out. Maybe I'm missing something and there's a step in between after-the-fact media and integrated media. A kind of value-added story perhaps? (Though I'm not sure how you would know you wanted more value until you've read it...) I'm just throwing all this out there for us to talk about.