09 Backstory

BACKSTORY is a personal story-based alternative to existing media outlets. It is devoted to independent voices and viewpoints. It is a forum for people to create, publish and retrieve visual stories on their own terms. BACKSTORY provides both public authoring stations and an online environment for the active use of media, with affordances for the formation of diverse communities around common interests and themes.

Conceived as a non-profit resource available to anyone, BACKSTORY's initial case study is “youth culture”, best defined by involvement in contemporary issues, ideas and experiences rather than an age bracket. The system includes affordances for individuals to filter or aggregate stories from the collection according to personal, institutional or community standards.

Topics

• Media Ecology
• News
• Personal Voice

Thought Process

We started with three phrases--Media Ecology, News and Personal Voice. We studied intersections among them and used qualitative and quantitative research methods to investigate attitudes toward these topics. We interviewed people from all age groups and backgrounds, including young adults, teachers, and senior citizens. Our research subjects were local, but the research content were issues with global effects. As the War on Iraq was becoming the main topic on the news, opinions about the media were easily elicited. We discussed and analyzed our findings regarding media, including television, newspapers and the Internet. We created zines and video ethnographies to document the findings.

In the context of our earlier research we concluded that the BACKSTORY brand should be cool, controversial and loud with an attitude with a do-it-yourself feel. For the experience design we decided on a do-it-yourself component as well as physical spaces where authors could create stories and view stories created by others. This physical space was named Backspace as an extension of the BACKSTORY brand. A website was needed to enable publishing, archiving, retrieving and viewing stories and to set up the affordances for community formation and communication among Backstorians.

Backstory.net provides the means for authors to upload their stories for online publication. It allows viewers to rate and aggregate stories. The BACKSTORY mission is to support an ever-growing community of people creating, publishing and searching for video-based personal stories. We decided to design BACKSTORY as an alternative to existing media outlets devoted to independent voices and viewpoints, offering broader exposure for diverse views with minimal editorial intervention. The use of the creative commons as an alternative to traditional copyright also enables authors to determine how their work can be used and under what terms.

grand strategy

"Facilitate Community Communication"

The Strategy: "Create a resource for authorship exchange and preservation of experience."

We began with the mandate of looking at the intersections among news, media ecology, and personal voice. There was a general sense that news is not trustworthy (politics, business models, lack of personal relevance) and a desire to create an alternative means of communication that would be relevant to real people. To experience personal voice firsthand, we produced several small-scale publications, participated in digital storytelling workshops, conducted diverse focus groups and installed public story-booth prototypes. This collective survey identified the importance of libraries and other public "nodes" to encourage physical participation and group gatherings, as well as the value of "themes" to drive the creation of materials (e.g., WWII veterans, local crafts and businesses, agriculture, schools, etc.)