ABSTRACT
How do the examples in this chapter help us understand the practice of storytelling in the mobile media age? Tragedies like the 9/11 attacks are understood not only by witnessing the events but also by the ways these events are told and retold. When considering how such national traumas like 9/11 are told-through oral histories, photographs, visualizations like timelines, to name a few-how might the mobile phone as a narrative interface transform our relationship to these stories and these memorializations? Using the “Explore 9/11” app from the National September 11 Memorial & Museum as the main object of study, this chapter notes how the screen of the phone transforms our relationship to the screen as a story interface (as it is interacted with differently than television and film screens). The result is a narrative that exists across several spaces: the site-specific locations related to 9/11 experienced in tandem with images on the phone’s screen, the audio space of the oral narratives that are unlocked when walking by certain locations, and the space of the archive of eyewitness accounts of the events (accessed through the phone’s interface). An analysis of the app thus shows that acts of memorialization, especially when experienced through emerging storytelling interfaces like the mobile phone, must be read through the lens of narrative-narratives that simultaneously interrogate these traumas as intensely public and private, in the past and ever-evolving.
