digital campfire

http://www.nwpassages.com

first a story

Once there was a young family who loved the natural world. They would take every opportunity to leave the city and spend time in the wilderness. The father sketched, the mother photographed, the children collected, and they all birdwatched. One such trip occurred at the end of summer, when the days were shortening and the evenings cooling. It was that magical time of day, a sleepy, perfect end to a languid, out of doors autumn adventure, and the family was ready for bed. They sat around the campfire, watching its embers slowly fade, feeling the last of its lazy heat. Gazing up at the heavens, the youngest child suddenly asked, "What's behind the stars?"

Who among us has not asked a similar question? Who has not contemplated of the possibility of another mythical, magical existence beyond the stars, and who has not dreamed of transporting ourselves from one world to another. Magically.

The young father had to choose from a number of possible answers, and he began to tell the child about Raven. Among the Haida people living on the northwest coast of Canada, there are many stories indicating that Raven has figured out how to accomplish such a journey. Raven is an intelligent bird, inquisitive, adventurous, creative. Often very wise even in spite of himself. He is an elegant bird, sleek, blue-black, immaculate. Often very alluring, in spite of himself. And he is an untrustworthy bird, devious, rash, vain. Often very comic, indeed in spite of himself.

The version of Raven's story that I know has been handed down by the Haida poet Skaay, and has recently been translated by Robert Bringhurst as Raven Travelling. Skaay says that Raven saw some kind of celestial portal and saw that it was possibly a way to travel from the mundane world of terra firma to the transcendant world of the heavens. Raven flew up to the portal, and according to Skaay, "He pushed his mind through and pulled his body after."

Such is the power of a story. A story allows us to put our mind anywhere we wish. And if the story is good enough, it will allow us not only to pull our own body after, but indeed to pull whole generations of our fellows along with us. The story of Raven and his journey beyond the sky, is just such a legend. It is a story that must be as old as Raven himself. Several thousand years certainly. It has been has been passed on orally, from one generation of storytellers to the next, without any more technology than a campfire. This process has made Raven a creator of culture, and if we take the Haida creation stories at their face value, it has made him the creator of very many aspects of the real world as well.

Stories are no longer limited to oral transmission, and no longer depend on this particular campfire. The technology of print has allowed the story to be easily, some would say more efficiently, disseminated in written form. Academics in particular have been very comfortable and successful in the literate medium. The very fact of being preserved in print gives stories importance and an authority that is has been critical to the development of a viable discourse. But communication is changing, and the audience expects a different kind of presentation. The campfire is still necessary, but it is not what it used to be. Just as print culture has molded academic discourse, the way we use our present campfire, the technology of the Internet, will determine the kind of discourse that develops in the very near future.

As new media develop, academics are beginning to move away from a dependence on the printed text and to look for new ways for the narrative to be presented in digital form. It is a time to consider the many qualitative aspects of our presentations, to use models that come from either oral for literate origins. Since some of the best story presentations are demonstrative rather than explicative, performative rather than passive, it is logical to assume that new forms and new technologies can be driven by the same demonstrative and performative impulses that motivated our ancestors.

Already when we "push our mind through", we will discover some very interesting information existing in some very interesting environments.

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