Two Kinds of Stories: The Page and The Screen

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Two Kinds of Stories: The Page and The Screen

I’m been working on a long, big, involved writing project since January 2007. And not one that can be done via tweets, posts, or powerpoint but instead in chapters employing reams and reams of paper crisscrossed into piles and filed with ink markings.

I started in Paris and two years later ended up in Barcelona in a markedly less charged, less anxious environment than New York. I grew my hair long, stopped getting highlights. I stopped wearing high heels and stopped shopping on Saturdays. (Shopping-as-hobby in euros and without a corporate paycheck, in a markedly less consumerist environment, feels absurd). I live in an ancient building with uneven stairs. Wearing heels would be impractical to say the least. . Instead, I’ve become quite the chefette. Fresh fish at Boqueria (and later Santa Caterina market) has led me to Google searches with alarming news of overfishing and the politics beyond my dinner table. Yikes.

But I left to cut the chatter out. To smell the sea and know thy butcher. The longer piece of writing is still not done (now it is!) but it is a living breathing thing that I will sorely miss when it is done. It’s what I do mornings. It’s my real and tangible life.

Afternoons, now back in the drink of digital and work life in the form of What Women Make and planning curriculum for teaching and workshops in branding and ethnography for the fall (done!), I am swimming deeper into digital space, a place where I find no up, down, or center, just endless self-perpetuating time. Time to infinity if you let it. As part of this, I have nestled myself deep in Twitter-land.

Sitting here in Barcelona, thinking about one of my characters, I scribbled in my notes, ‘are we all building concentric circles and burying ourselves in the middle of them?’

I began my dive into Twitter by looking for women makers online and swimming down that path I ended up finding scores upon scores of tech heroines – connectors, doers, investors, travelers, oracles – and I’m amazed at the female talent, passion, and community that’s showing it’s face.

I haven’t done that much writing outside my book ever since I started working on it but I realized this question has nothing to do with my book and everything to do with my digital observations. We are blowing bubbles of concentric circles every time we add a twitter connection. We float in our bubbles and we seek out: The Conference. Conferences seem to be a crucial oxygen seeking mission in all this. We come up for air there. After all, people want to speak, laugh, see one another, share the same carpet.

After the conference, we all go home, follow one another on twitter and go on building our concentric circles. But hopefully that’s not all.

How often do our circles land in tangibles?

When do they form intersecting points that lead to applications, products, services, marriages, babies, and all that good stuff?

They do, I know they do, but I’m interested in those stories. The ones grafted on the page of social networking that come alive in physical space.

I want even the physical space tinkerers or artisans to have a foot in both without compromising their craft.

I love this rapid evolution. As it changes life itself, I’m pleased with the slippery easy online glide. I remember when it was so much more cumbersome.

I think of what it can and will look like – the synergistic evolution going on in the ever widening half of our life that is lived online also happening in equal measure in physical space. To me, that is the ultimate and most critical pursuit.

-Chauncey Zalkin