I’ve been saying for a while that I thought location based services had the potential to drive narrative and storytelling as well as all of the other social elements they are so clearly enabling. While there are still layers of structure that need to be added to the current crop of apps, Foursquare, Gowalla, TriOutNC and the like, in order for narrative and story to flourish, I came across The Mobile City Blog this week which in turn led me to Untravel Media out of Boston.
Untravel is a company that produces location based storytelling media and their CEO, Michael Epstein, has coined the term “terrative” to describe this, a combination of territory and narrative.
Here’s the link to the Mobile City post, Storytelling with Locative Media: Michael Epstein’s take on ‘terratives’.
Several things about terratives really caught my attention. They can be linear, the famous beginning, middle and end kind of story. They can also be exploratory as Martijn de Waal at Mobile City writes about them. Those exploratory avenues can bring in elements of game play and competition, something that seems to have worked very well for the location based apps mentioned earlier.
Also, their potential for engaging us in urban issues through an experience that links location and story is inspiring.
Head over to Martijn blog post and read what he has to say and see what you think about the potential for location based story and terratives. You might also want to read this PDF Moving Story where Michael talks about socially-relevant, location-based storytelling on mobile devices. It’s quite good.
Update: Just after I posted this, I came across this blog post, Mapping archives and local stories from Monique Potts. It’s in a similar vein but this caught my attention.
“While these are great sites I wanted to find some examples where there was more of a User Generated Content approach so people could add their own stories, photos and comments easily.”
Head on over to her blog post and read the rest when you get a chance.
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