By: Kacey Bates
Shared Stories Lab is a Vertically Integrated Project aimed to explore the importance of oral history, storytelling, and community through the long-term narrative collection. As a student-driven initiative sponsored by Boise State, Shared Stories Lab uses the campus community to drive engagement, foster relationships, and create opportunities for narrative data collection.
In the modern world, it’s easy to forget the importance of oral history. We live having constant access to fast information; moving so quickly that sometimes taking the time to listen becomes an inconvenience. We often neglect the process and history of sharing information by choosing search engines over interaction. Slowly, the role personal connections have in passing information from one to another is being eliminated. When we take the time to engage with personal retellings and orally passing information, we leave with new perspectives. Interacting with others through passing information solidifies our knowledge and allows the chance to hear new understandings.
Historically, oral history is responsible for a large portion of our success as humans. We can’t say that storytelling is responsible for where we are now, but we can say it was necessary for a long time. Without the capability to pass the information along for generations, growth and improvement would have been impossible. Easily accessible written documentation is fairly new to our history, leaving storytelling and oral recollections of information as the main forms for a considerable amount of time. I believe we’ve survived as humans because we were able to learn from one another, learn from the past, and communicate. However, as learning becomes less reliant on the interaction I begin to wonder what we are losing, and how to stop it from disappearing?
From the long-term perspective, fast access to information is new. Other than newspapers, daily news was the way to be updated. Before that tuning in on the radio and engaging with neighbors. Slowly we’ve moved towards independent access to information, and it’s hard to even imagine where oral history belongs in our current world. However, we often interact with forms of oral history without notice. When engaging with platforms like podcasts, YouTube videos, and recorded interviews we’re reinforcing the importance of adding human interaction back into passing information.
Now, most of our engagements with oral history are passive and do not appreciate the art and history. But that’s not necessarily bad, it’s showing that as the world changes, the art of stories and oral history is changing with it.