A great set of videos in which Ira Glass (radio host of This American Life - blog) discuss storytelling — especially relevant if you’ve been thinking about podcasts (or narratives in exhibits).
Food for thought: this post at the Re-Imagineering Blog in which the author roundly criticizes Eisner’s “What’s the Story” mantra starting in the mid-80s. Essentially, one of the overarching concerns in any new Disney attraction was making sure that there was underlying story and plot points along the way. Arguably good in theory, bad in practice. The post lists 14 attractions that follow the same basic premise — something/someone is lost, the guests help find it/them.
So, the moment of self reflection for me is thinking about all of those exhibits over time in which we’ve wanted to create a story, or very deliberately, convey context. In museums, we argue that without these underlying elements, seemingly random objects or events potentially lack meaning. Do we need to do this? (The answer is no, and I think is just the ongoing tension between interpretation and display which is a fine line to be repeatedly crossed to find a good balance for different museums).
Even more interesting to me is that the author of the Re-Imagineering post points out that in the current story-driven environment that experiences that convey pageantry and experience alone couldn’t be created. And, they’re arguably some of the most compelling attractions at Disney ever — It’s A Small World, Jungle Cruise, the original submarine voyage, etc. In the museum context, are curators (traditionally pushing for the more non-interpretive experience) really just coming from the same place as Walt himself was in originally creating Disneyland? And that all of the bad stuff in the last 20 years at Disney really just the bad playing out on a large scale what it means to be overly focused on interpretation?