Convergence Culture

In this weeks lecture we were joined by one of Liverpool's top film production companies, Hurricane Films. As part of our Applied Media Research module at LJMU they presented us with a question:

How can you engage an on-line audience in story telling?- How do you encourage users, especially those from an older generation to participate?

This is related to Hurricane Films project called Peoples Stories

This is an online operation to share stories from the older generation within Merseyside before they are lost forever. It follows their earlier film 'Of Time and The City' which Solon Papadopoulos and Roy Boulter of Hurricane Films produced. 

The first thing that you have to consider about trying to reach this older generation is that, it will always be harder for them to become aware of the site due to their lack of knowledge surrounding the internet itself. Therefore the first question that should be asked is how many people over the age of 60 actually use the internet? Without conducting any initial quantative research it is easy to conclude that this number will be proportionality small. So how do you reach that population? There were several ways that were discussed in the presentation:

• Actively go out into the community and record their stories by going to community centres, whether that is by filming the subject or having them write or tell you their specific story.
• Appealing in the local newspaper by writing an advert/story
• Going into the local museum/ working along side them
• Simply using old media such as photographs, paintings and videos

A few things that I have thought of since the presentation would be going into primary or junior schools and working with them to find a story about their family history or organize a festival all about the project where they physically come to you and tell you their story. Although like always there will be pro's and con's to this such as; would anyone come to it? Are some stories already lost in history? 

Looking more specifically at the Peoples Stories website, are their any barriers to its interface such as logging in/ registering due to a lack of an email address for example. However the content on the site is accessible without a user profile and so this makes it an open source for everyone. One thing that was brought up was user testing of the website before it goes live, and thus allowing problems or patterns to become recognised and solved. 

The key aim of this project is to create a platform for sharing, and past example of this concept is Ridley Scott's 'A Day in the Life' where people from around the globe share what happened on one specific day:

Peoples Stories allows everyone a resource for telling their story and as long as you give them a reason why they want to share it, 90% of the time they probably will. Like 'A Day in the Life' it gives you the chance to become part of history. 

 A final thought that I had on the afore mentioned question was surrounding the future of this project, will it become extinct 50 years from now because there is so much information about 'now' on the internet or will this project become even bigger. Will it encourage to-days youth to film the now, for archives in the future?