Storybases

Just come back from a fascinating lecture by Paul Rankin of LCS, or Living Cultural Storybases, an NGO which helps indigenous tribes all over the world to record and share their stories. Rankin is an inventor and looks at the most appropriate means of collecting these increasingly endangered traditions as young people move away from the villages and their storytelling elders.

But, entranced as I was by the work he was telling us about at the University of Brighton, he made me think about the young people I'm researching and their diverse language and the culture it expresses. He was talking about indigenous tribes but when he reminded us why their culture is being eroded, I wondered if our missionary zeal to push punctuation is missing the point in the same way as those other zealots who took the written word to oral traditions. If diversity sparks the kind of creativity we all know it's so important to keep, maybe we should be looking at what this texting culture is creating.  What stories are young people telling and what's in this new melting pot of cultures that we didn't grow up sharing the playgrounds with and mixing in with what he had around our own dinner table? What are they, just like we did, keeping us elders out of?