Abbe Don remembers what her grandmother's reaction was to her great-grandmother's endless retelling of tales of coming to America on a boat in 1896, fleeing the pogroms in Lithuania:
"Enough with the stories already!"
For Don, however, an interface designer and interactive multimedia artist, there can never be enough sharing of stories. As executive producer of the first Digital Story Bee - one of the events that will inaugurate Jewish Web Week, which begins Sunday - Don is coordinating three-hour workshops that will teach women in Moscow, Kiev, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv and San Francisco how to use the Web to tell the stories of their lives.
The name of the event calls to mind images of quilting bees, where a circle of women would come together to trade gossip and memories while crafting hand-woven garments and bedclothes. Instead of textiles and thread, the women will bring family memories and photographs to the circle, and use site-building software - Visual Page, donated by Symantec - to craft their sites. Don points out that no computing experience at all is required to participate. The theme of the event will be "stories of grandmothers and women who influence your life."
"The early-adopters have been doing this stuff for awhile, but now the next wave of people are getting involved," Don says. "They see what I'm doing on my site and they say, 'How do you do this? Can you do it for me?' As you can imagine, that doesn't scale very well." Rather than teach the workshop participants bare-bones HTML editing, Don is having them use Visual Page, she says, because "I wanted them to be able to have something finished in an afternoon."
Don's primary labor of love is a storytelling site called Bubbe's Back Porch. To scale her workshop so that women in the U.S., Israel, and the former Soviet Union can take part, Don locked down a sponsorship from Maxima New Media, publisher of the Jewish Heritage Online Magazine. A worldwide coalition of organizations is also pitching in to coordinate the event, from the Bay Area Council on Jewish Rescue and Renewal in Palo Alto, California, to Hillel chapters in Moscow and St. Petersburg, to the Kiev Center for Jewish Education.
Derek Powazek, who created one of the most highly praised storytelling forums on the Web, The Fray, agrees that people seeing the Web for the first time are often most engaged by personal histories, and by the possibility that they could learn how to relate their own narratives in the medium.
Though Powazek believes the Web has ignited a renaissance of autobiography and memoir, the societal significance of that has been underappreciated, he contends, because "unlike other literary movements in the past, there have been no books, no experts, no publishers, no press, and no market" - just tens of thousands of home pages, where stories, like the journal of one young woman who fought in Desert Storm, are published to the world with no fanfare.
Powazek has faith that as more and more people become involved in interactive projects like Sunday's Digital Story Bee, there will be an essential shift in the expectations that people have of media. After he became "waist deep in the Web," Powazek says, "I started getting more and more unhappy about the fact that when I talked to my television, it wasn't listening. ... The other media are going to have to respond to that challenge, and it's going to have to be more than 'letters to the editor.'"
