New Media Steps
In the wake of the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike, Golick became one of the first Canadian screenwriters to experiment in online storytelling. Her first effort, boymeetsgrrl, told the tale of a dating couple, Simon Beals and Ali Barret. Simon and Ali's romance was explored through Facebook wall messages and status updates, Twitter tweets, blog entries and video blog segments.
Controversy erupted when Golick presented her findings to a Casecamp conference in 2008. Several people in the audience, upon realizing that they'd been "friended" by Golick's digital avatars, complained to Facebook and had the profiles deleted. Afterward, Golick agreed that there seemed to be a disconnect between the marketers and the creative storytellers about what constituted a "proper use of the medium." "One of the things that so interesting about this little flurry around boymeetgrrl! is that people aren’t upset at sneaky underhanded sales tactics," Golick wrote. "They’re not all upset that I was trying to sell them something. They’re angry because art infiltrated their lives. They got swept up into a story and didn’t realize till later that these were characters and not real people. The characters didn’t do anything to them, they weren’t evil or malicious. They just tried to be friendly, funny and entertaining."
Golick continues to develop new online projects through Story2.OH, including the award winning digital detective series for tweens, Ruby Skye PI (Web Series).
Golick maintains a blog, Running With My Eyes Closed, on television writing and is currently the president of the Writers Guild of Canada and the chair of the Canadian Screenwriting Awards. She teaches television writing and transmedia at York University in Toronto, Ontario.
Read more about this topic: Jill Golick
Famous quotes containing the words media and/or steps:
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“Perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox has obtained the widest and most familiar reputation.... His recent tracks still give variety to a winter’s walk. I tread in the steps of the fox that has gone before me by some hours, or which perhaps I have started, with such a tip-toe of expectation as if I were on the trail of the Spirit itself which resides in the wood, and expected soon to catch it in its lair.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)