Art, Storytelling,
and the Digital Economy
Jason Ohler
Art Becomes the Fourth R
Our dependence on art literacy has
gone largely unnoticed by policy
makers, a fact we can see play out
in an average school day. For years
I have watched students struggle
to create multimedia projects that
communicate effectively. They don’t
struggle with the technology, which
is now all but
Creating successful web pages second nature
requires the skills of the designer to them. Instead, they
and insight of the artist. struggle with
aesthetics and
design—the grammar of applied art.
Text, once the default medium of
communication, is now just one of
many communication approaches
and can be very limiting in the
multi-lingual world of the global
economy. If we are going to require
our students to create web pages,
digital stories, and other multime-
dia communication projects, then
Never before in modern
times have art and storytelling been more
important to the practical
running of the real world than they
are now. Consider the web page, that
ubiquitous communication form
that greets us each morning and
travels with us throughout the day.
Successful web pages
require the
skills of the
designer and
insight of the
artist in order to blend pictures,
music, animation, text, and other
media into a fluid, adaptable, coherent story. The concern that our
children might grow up to be artists
and live lives of destitution is out of
date. The digital landscape without
art and story becomes unengaging
and ineffective. The era of the artist
and storyteller has arrived.
we need to make art a literacy—the
fourth R—rather than just a content
area.
Digital Storytelling
There is a natural segue from art to
story literacy in the digital age that
follows the movement from static
to dynamic digital communication
forms. As web pages evolved from
essays in the early days of the Internet, they were largely static, consisting of pictures, text, and hyperlinks
that allowed users to access more
static information.
But as the defacto standard
for new media narrative began to
include motion and time structure,
and as programs like iMovie encouraged packaging expression in the
form of miniature movies, the need
for story to craft new media became
obvious. From this development
emerged a popular form of digital
expression, the digital story.
