Designing public spaces for democratic stories

  • Authors:
  • Mike Ananny;Carol Strohecker

  • Affiliations:
  • Media Lab Europe;Media Lab Europe

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Story representation, mechanism and context
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We argue that civic discourse can also be public storytelling and propose three reasons to consider this relationship: stories' relational nature - their ability to represent uniquely human perspectives and emotions - may ameliorate aspects of citizens' disinterest in civic life; the ability of stories to represent both individual perspectives and cultural norms may offer a form of public opinion that is relevant on both personal and collective scales; and the inherent transparency of familiar narrative forms may offer new ways to explicate unfamiliar aspects civic discourse. We propose a relationship between civic discourse and public storytelling and review one system called TexTales in relation to a developing model of "democratic stories.