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Like
many of us in the field, I have been trying to find
a way to teach about new media without teaching just
the technology itself, but instead teaching about the
process of new media design from the point of view of
the artist, the storyteller, the narrator, from the
point of view of the audience member and the non-technologist.
The trick has been trying to figure out a way to combine
the instruction of narrative and culture with the instruction
of technological design in a way that makes sense to
students and is also connected with the praxis of new
media construction (Everett & Caldwell).
As I discovered when I first
began teaching in Japan,
people like telling or hearing ghost stories, and
therefore this fondness for ghost tales was an effective
narrative hook to use in the presentation of more complex
subject matter. The ghost story not only is a simple
narrative to construct, it is also cross-culturally
pervasive since ghost stories always deal with the one
thing we all share, mortality. I thought that using
the metaphor of the ghost and the ideas associated with
haunting a physical (or virtual) space could be an effective
way to bridge the gaps between the cultures of technologists,
designers, artists and users since we all share an interest
and a set of preconceptions about ghosts and ghost stories. |
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