What is Hybrid Ecosystem

This chapter describes a participatory design experiment that is influenced by the swarming activity. The chapter introduces a new approach to writing narratives in virtual learning communities of the social Web 2.0 and contrasts it with traditional storytelling approaches. In the participatory design experiment we developed a hybrid virtual storytelling playground that augments the real world – a hybrid ecosystem of narratives. It consists of social software tools freely available in the Web, such as microblogs, social repositories of images, and blogs, the real locations in the city, and the storytellers who leave their digital contents. The results of writing narratives as a swarm in a hybrid ecosystem are presented. In our experiment, instead of bending old novel formats into the hybrid ecosystem, the evidences of new evolving narrative formats of this hybrid space were explored.