It’s not unusual to describe Margaret Atwood and her views as thought-provoking: in this interview with the US website bigthink.com she touches on a number of topics we’re talking about, or will talk about, in class: social media, where stories come from and how they come together, even the motivations behind storytelling itself.
Beyond the actual content, there’s still more to think about in the way this piece is put together. Focus, multimedia production approaches, new formats for interviews: it’s interesting on all these fronts and more.
Questions to think about include:
- Is this one interview or several?
- How did they choose the topics? – Does each get enough attention?
- How would you focus this in your advance preparation?
- The interviewer doesn’t appear at all, and Atwood addresses the camera directly. This is becoming a common production approach in online interviews. What do you think of it?
-The text @ the bottom of this post is cut and pasted from the e-newsletter I got from bigthink.com this morning. What do you think of it as an intro to the interview? (length, number of links, etc)
- On the site, there is a clickable ‘lineup’ of the whole interview that lets you jump to sections of interest, or a transcription of the complete interview. How useful are these?
Overview text from bigthink.com’s e-newsletter (the links don’t work in my cut-and-paste, but I’ve bolded them)
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“Canadians have a reprehensible habit of making fun of just about everything,” says novelist Margaret Atwood. In her Big Think interview, Atwood tries to explain Canadian humor, asking us, “What does a Canadian girl say when you ask her if she’d like some sex?” Though highly entertaining in person, Atwood’s books are not particularly known for their humor. Her most recent novel “The Year of the Flood,” is about a future in which mankind has been decimated by a man-made virus. Discussing the preponderance of books and movies about the apocalypse in recent years, Atwood said that they become popular “when people have suddenly realized that things may not necessarily go on along the same set of assumptions that they have been going on for the last little while.
Atwood’s books may talk about technology as a threat to mankind, but she’s no Luddite. The sprightly 71-year-old is an active Twitter user and a proponent of e-books. She told us about some of her favorite Twitter threads, including the recent push to elect a turnip as Prime Minister of Canada. A prolific author of more than thirty books, Atwood also describes her creative process and what it’s like for her to begin a new book. The hardest part about writing fiction for her, she says, is exposition. Atwood comes from a scientific family, so she knows much about the evolutionary science and neurology behind reading and storytelling. Storytelling is also a deeply human activity, she says, one that may have emerged as an evolutionary adaptation.
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Thought-provoking Margaret Atwood
September 30th, 2010 Comments Off
Beyond the actual content, there’s still more to think about in the way this piece is put together. Focus, multimedia production approaches, new formats for interviews: it’s interesting on all these fronts and more.
Questions to think about include:
- Is this one interview or several?
- How did they choose the topics? – Does each get enough attention?
- How would you focus this in your advance preparation?
- The interviewer doesn’t appear at all, and Atwood addresses the camera directly. This is becoming a common production approach in online interviews. What do you think of it?
-The text @ the bottom of this post is cut and pasted from the e-newsletter I got from bigthink.com this morning. What do you think of it as an intro to the interview? (length, number of links, etc)
- On the site, there is a clickable ‘lineup’ of the whole interview that lets you jump to sections of interest, or a transcription of the complete interview. How useful are these?
Overview text from bigthink.com’s e-newsletter (the links don’t work in my cut-and-paste, but I’ve bolded them)
====================
“Canadians have a reprehensible habit of making fun of just about everything,” says novelist Margaret Atwood. In her Big Think interview, Atwood tries to explain Canadian humor, asking us, “What does a Canadian girl say when you ask her if she’d like some sex?” Though highly entertaining in person, Atwood’s books are not particularly known for their humor. Her most recent novel “The Year of the Flood,” is about a future in which mankind has been decimated by a man-made virus. Discussing the preponderance of books and movies about the apocalypse in recent years, Atwood said that they become popular “when people have suddenly realized that things may not necessarily go on along the same set of assumptions that they have been going on for the last little while.
Atwood’s books may talk about technology as a threat to mankind, but she’s no Luddite. The sprightly 71-year-old is an active Twitter user and a proponent of e-books. She told us about some of her favorite Twitter threads, including the recent push to elect a turnip as Prime Minister of Canada. A prolific author of more than thirty books, Atwood also describes her creative process and what it’s like for her to begin a new book. The hardest part about writing fiction for her, she says, is exposition. Atwood comes from a scientific family, so she knows much about the evolutionary science and neurology behind reading and storytelling. Storytelling is also a deeply human activity, she says, one that may have emerged as an evolutionary adaptation.
Like this: