Restorying: Between the Web and Me
“Until the Lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the Hunter.”
When reading Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiuolo's piece called, "Restorying the Self: Bending Toward Textual Justice Textual Justice," they begin by mentioning Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. As soon as they say Adichie, I am transported back to 2014 when I was on a double-decker bus after sundown in London reading her book, "Americanah". I was so engulfed in this story of a Nigerian woman that I missed my bus stop and was caught inside the book. The story was so different from my own, but I felt so connected to it. Readers get that feeling when they are all alone yet submerged inside the story, characters, and places in the book. A story and its complexities have a way of staying with you. It was an example of restorying that caught in in the first few sentences. A forefather in the Nigerian literary canon, Chinua Achebe, that people who have been silenced or left out should restory themselves so that they are not the victims of other accounts.
The authors use this text to theorize how young people are using new media and textual tools to write themselves into existence globally.
The process of restorying in the digital age has six forms:
Time
Place
Perspective
Mode
Metanarrative
Identity
The authors highlight how Critical Race Theory (CRT), a hot-button issue in conservative spaces, does not often see that CRT centers on storytelling and personal narrative as a method that acts as a counternarrative from the alternative of the dominant (read stereotypical) perspectives. Young people are using media to place themselves at the center of stories. More recently, on Tik Tok, there has been a trend/hashtag about having "main character energy" that became popular towards the end of most lockdowns across the U.S. "Main character energy” is when young people see themselves as the main character in their own lives. To take up space and exist as if the world centers you (in the healthiest ways possible). The original video and sound were created by a young white woman but was dueted (remixed) by Black women and people of color who are rarely the main character of any story.
The authors detail the six forms of restorying as ways for young people to reflect themselves in works traditionally set to center on White, Christian, and heterosexual people who often exist in thin bodies. When the youth restory their identity through fandom, they use racebending to allow the character they identify with to look more like them. For instance, I was a late but big fan of "Mad Men. I imagined myself in the 1950s and 1960s as advertising executive, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who was handsome, charming, and moved from working class to a high-power executive in the company. However, in the show, there was never a Black male character who worked as an executive, and the only Black woman worked as a secretary. I never spent time imagining how the “Mad Men” culture would be different if it were cast to fit me in the narrative; I simply sat outside of this world, erased. But I do not entirely blame myself for having a lack of imagination. Still, the tools to create freely (social media, applications) have been the medium of restorying.
And sometimes I wonder, "Am I trying to restory experiences that will no longer matter as technology improves?" While I imagined myself existing decades ago, peers are envisioning a world unknown in A.I. During COVID, I learned, invested, and was even gifted an NFT. Of course, I explored YouTube to try to understand. Still, the limitations of my experiences stunted my ability to fully understand the creation of a new currency like Bitcoin because I have yet to experience wealth or extra income to live above my current means. As I tried to understand OpenAI's GPT-3, the new language generator, it mainly felt uninteresting. I know it is essential to some, but I am so interested in generating the human text of my own life and experiences that reading an A.I.'s imaginary writing of Jerome K. Jerome was… just ok. But I must challenge myself because the future is here, and I enjoy seeing what direction we will go as humans in web 3.0. A new media will undoubtedly provide new tools for restorying.
And while reading and exploring restorying as a form of creativity and dignity, Web 3.0 and social media 2.0 begins asking us to consider how monetization and capitalism will continue to become the norm. Bernard Marr writes about how tipping and subscriptions to creators are a product of social media 2.0. I struggle with this simply because I believe people should be paid for their gifts, especially Twitter scholars who share widely accepted perspectives that can sometimes get stolen or misused. The struggle has come from the paywall (super follow) keeping you from the creators' work and why you follow them.
I sometimes feel stuck between two worlds: attempting to spread light on the stories and narratives that have been erased or a world where the new media will push us forward. Yet, I am holding a rope of the past in my left hand and the other half of the cord of the future in my right. Every day I work to try to tie and reconcile these two realities into this one moment: the present story I am attempting to tell.
“The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”
