After reading the chapter “Web 2.0 Storytelling” from Bryan Alexander‘s book The New Digital Storytelling, I was opened up to a world where various social media platforms still used today (Twitter, blogs, etc.) are used to tell actual stories, both fictional and non-fictional. From my understanding, what makes Digital Storytelling digital is the fact that the storytellers are communicating and essentially “writing” the story using all types of media. They are taking the digital tools we use everyday, and manipulating them to produce something exciting, creative, and interactive. I have heard of fan-written stories about shows and movies (or “fanfiction”), but I never knew that users used blogs to create fictional stories, updated in real time, consisting of characters represented by real people. It’s a crazy, but cool concept. These people step out of their actual lives and into the shoes of a fictional digital character.

With this in mind, I don’t think that the pages Scenes from The Wire and Facebook’s The Wire are representations of digital storytelling. Scenes from The Wire does not have users interacting to tell a story. It solely consists of GIFs and images extracted from the series to show a specific scene. Facebook’s The Wire is even less of a representation of the Web 2.0 Storytelling that Alexander refers to. The Facebook page appears as a place to relay information about the show to the public. It also looks like it functions as a marketing tool as the most recent posts advertise the show, products related to the show, and images of actors who have appeared on the show. Perhaps if someone created a fictional “The Wire” blog in which real people took the roles of the characters on the show, planned fictional crimes to investigate, and posted the progress of their fictional investigation whilst interacting with one another on the blog, then the blog would be an excellent representation of Web 2.0 Storytelling.