Giving context a voice
March 15th, 2010At the panel, Tristan Harris talked about the experience of visiting a museum with a friend at your elbow, explaining the backstory of each painting. Asa form of context-provision that’s pretty ideal. But what’s important about it is that this is your friend’s voice.
Voice wasn’t really addressed by anyone at the panel. Matt asked, where does Wikipedia fall down? And this is one area: by design, it lacks personal voice.
So much of contextual info is provided as footnotes, aftermatter, backstory. As such it lacks personality and ends up being easily ignored by the people who need it most.
The power of everyone’s favorite example, the This American Life “Pool of Money” piece, lies in the strong personal voice its storytelling uses.
How do we give the frame of a story the compelling personality of a great storyteller’s voice? We need to make the footnotes sing and dance. The idea of “object-oriented storytelling” is great, but we have to figure out how the storyteller’s voice survives the transformation into separate objects.
The power of the “Great Pool of Money” does lie in its voice, but also – as I suggest here (http://www.futureofcontext.com/?p=11#comment-11) – in the fact that it dealt with an issue that everyone found equally confusing, ie, how the financial crisis came about. With most stories, different readers have different levels of knowledge, so the problem becomes one of how to customise context.
Good point. As someone who is preoccupied with information architecture, it’s something I tend to forget. It’s not just about relationships between content, but also about how to present that information and make it speak to readers, engage them. Very tough question to answer though.
While voice may be compelling for deeper dives, my sense is that visual presentation is more important in a high-level overview that “hooks” the reader into further exploration. Specifically, interactive graphics such as timelines with clickable events utilize our innate graphical processing capabilities and allow drilling down on topic facets in a flexible manner.