“How to Create A Financial Crisis”
“How to Create a Financial Crisis” by Charles Trahan and his team is a work of educational storytelling made exclusively for the audience of the digital age. In the form of a graphic text conversation with economist Léon Courville a stripped down and easier to digest version of economics is presented with changing viewer habits in mind. Viewing habits that only developed in the new media age. These habits include a preference to more concise and interactive media. I believe “How To Create a Financial Crisis” represents the best and most effective way to teach complex issues to this new audience.
The journey unfolds on various slides that are optimized for mobile consumption, but can be viewed easily on a computer as well. Gifs and still images interchange slide to slide to mimic a timeline filled with unique images, but all of them have Léon Courville’s face in the lower left hand corner giving facts and explanations about the images. The scrolling of “How to Create a Financial Crisis” is done from side to side to mimic the swiping of smart phone home screens and apps like Tinder. This is evidence of the new media focus of this project. The project has to be shorter and more concise because of the format being presented or it wouldn’t work or be effective. Long paragraphs of text would fill up the entire screen and render the point of the mobile distribution worthless. The adventure is broken up into stages with natural breaks that are shorter and take around 4–5 minutes to get through, but if the user swipes through all of stages in one sitting the project takes about 20–25 minutes to complete.
Five concepts are introduced in the stages using the same characters throughout who represent various archetypes of the major and minor players of the financial world. Trahan’s piece doesn’t go in depth on character descriptions because the point is brevity. The audience could find longer more detailed explanations in a text book or even an hour long video, but those media do not reflect the current standards of storytelling. Effective storytelling in the digital age informs or moves the audience without drowning them in details. “How to Create a Financial Crisis” informs us about the changing methods of storytelling by getting the information to the audience quicker and easier. The piece accomplishes this by explanations sometimes involving emojis and even comical gifs to explain certain concepts. The creators are relating the complex language of economics into something the new media consumer can recognize. This enables the audience to grasp the concepts being presented easier than if the same information was presented in a textbook with definitions and walls of text. Thereby the user can understand the concept faster saving time and that time can be used to learn more about other concepts presented or any other activities planned.
As noted by Nicholas Carr in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” the web takes information and ideas and turns them into messages like “a swiftly moving stream of particles”. “How to Create A Financial Crisis” certainly replicates that as reading an individual slide can take as little as ten seconds. In the digital age the way consumers first receive news is a to the point push notification. This is a stark difference from the longer form newspapers of old media, and the shorter explanations in the piece certainly weren’t designed to replicate newspapers. “How to Create a Financial Crisis” strives to focus everything and get the content into a form the consumer sees everyday on their phones and online. While there is a lot of content to explore this digital piece breaks up what could be an overwhelming amount of content with the simplicity in which it is presented. The format also allows the viewer to move at their own pace unlike a video which would constantly propel the viewer to watch till the end the first time without stopping.
Many of Brian Neede’s concept for New Media are found in “How to Create a Financial Crisis”. The piece can only be consumed on a mobile device or a computer, and that means that its only distribution platform is computers and similar technologies. This distribution practice means that people all over the world can reach “How To Create A Financial Crisis”. Any English speaker can access “How to Create a Financial Crisis” and learn while swiping along. The project can only live on the Internet as printing out the slides would not fully convey the message or even be able to get all information as the texts sometimes block images on a screen. Input is a major part of the adventure as Léon Courville asks questions the user answers by clicking a response.
The ways real financial crisis work and the data behind them have been known for decades, but this information is distributed in new and quicker ways. All of this matters because without the stark contrasts, demonstrated by the piece, to old media we could not see how the new media has changed audience’s habits of reading and interaction.
The digital adventure “How to Create a Financial Crisis” sets the template for the most effective way to teach a digital age audience because of the use of short messages, easy to follow images, and relation of information to the modern viewer all of which allows the audience to consume the content in a easier and more effective way. The piece also shows us how we have changed the way we view and interact with storytelling with the new technologies that have emerged giving us a quicker more informed world. The world of long form complex and convoluted explanations in media is giving way to the world of streamlined information.
