Being a bit of a techie and a humanist who has a thing for folklore and narrative in all its various guises, I am connected to a bunch of “digital storytelling” folks on Twitter. In fact, they started to find me just after the moment all the transcription services found me…
Anyways, I have been pondering the ways that this field of digital storytelling is often nothing but a sugar-coated marketing and branding effort. That is not to say that there aren’t digital storytellers doing (what I consider) valid, non-consumerist work, but it is to say that there is a large (and perhaps growing) contingency of folks out there that are are either comfortable enough with the genre of digital storytelling to let its nefarious undercurrent of needs-product evocateur to go unnoticed. Or, perhaps they intend to use it to this exact end.
So, to all those who want to encourage the use of media for branding toward products and “purchase-ables,” I present to you Miss Sarah from Current TV. Gotta love her.
Of course, media use for the branding of one’s self deserves a dissertation of its own.
Tags: branding, consumerism, digital storytelling, fairytale, marketing