Convergence Culture: A new sport, using satellite technology, echoes the work of early cartographers, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.

One of the discoveries of the digital age is that most people tell stories, to themselves and each other.

The idea of us all being narrators is a little puzzling. Bookshops, after all, are temples populated by the select few who fashion narratives for a living, and Amazon.com is the supreme digital home of the true narrator.

But ever since the internet began, people with a yen to tell have used it.

Lately, the buzz has been around blogs but in the early days, and still in the background, the new genre was known as digital storytelling. Digital storytelling tends to be more free-form than traditional print-based narration and less personal than blogging. It can include pictures, video, text, and sound, and it tends to have a collective purpose.

The Center For Digital Storytelling puts it like this: "Every community has a memory of itself. Not a history, nor an archive, nor an authoritative record . . . A living memory, an awareness of a collective identity woven of a thousand stories." Recently, digital storytelling has been joined by another phenomenon - narratives constructed out of collective activities rather than by distinctive, narrative plotting. One of its more unusual forms in which stories have emerged is sport, specifically a new sport called geocaching, which in turn illustrates another new phenomenon, crowd-sourcing.

Geocaching began in 2000 when it became legally possible to use Global Positioning System (GPS) units for leisure activities. GPS units are hand-held devices that allow you to locate yourself on any coordinate on a map. They make the perfect treasure hunt possible. Courtesy of satellite technology and the World Wide Web, people around the world are retelling and rebuilding the treasure-hunt story. Ireland is one of those places where the pot of gold lies buried.

But what is the point of geocaching? Put simply, it is a walk with a cache or small prize at the end. In the early days of geocaching the purpose was not to find the buried treasure but to add something to a cache, to give a small amount of treasure rather than to take. It is rambling with a sense of discovery and giving.

Geocachers use GPS technology to locate themselves and the cache they are seeking. They work in the same way as the new in-car navigation systems.

In the United States, geocachers have set about rediscovering the geodetic markers that are scattered around the American landscape and were part of the original survey of the US. Similar surveys were undertaken in Ireland and form the basis of pre-GPS maps. American geocachers have rediscovered more than 92,000 of them, many of which are in public places in towns and cities. Their rediscovery is a retelling of how America evolved its spatial self-awareness and its transportation routes.

This kind of narrative is sometimes referred to as crowd-sourcing, a neologism that dates back only as far as June 2006. In the US, yet again, crowd-sourcing is now being used by a small number of journalistic enterprises to develop new investigative narratives for the news media. Wikipedia tells us that "crowd-sourcing models are being applied across a broad range of industries, including entertainment, law enforcement, journalism, foreign intelligence, scientific research, and photography".

French/Tunisian philosopher Pierre Lévy wrote about crowd-sourcing as long ago as 1994 but back then he called it Collective Intelligence. Underlying both terms is a viewpoint that says even the apparently uncoordinated activities of a large crowd can create a story that is more than the sum of its parts.

But back to treasure hunts. In Ireland the latest mapping work for GPS covers 95,369 kilometres of road linking over 44,000 cities, towns and villages on the island. Geocachers have plenty of places to hide their caches. They go by curious names such as House in the Wood, Blarney Cache, End of the Line and Crazy Sheep Everywhere. Every county has some.

When geocaching first began, it was not uncommon for cachers to leave sentimental but financially worthless objects for others to find. Now it is possible to have your own "geocoins" specially minted. Although not high in cash value, the geocoins help in creating narratives. By specifying what should be done with a geocoin, a geocacher gradually creates narratives of events that link the various people who have discovered, moved, kept or passed on their treasure. It's not like writing a book, but that would be so old fashioned.

WORDS IN YOUR EAR

Geodetic surveys- systems of spatial-reference points used for mapping and transportation.

Crowd-sourcing- collating data and narratives from public participation in an event or story.

GPS- Global Positioning System, which uses satellite technology to provide more accurate positioning.

Geocaching- a new sport that uses GPS to identify the whereabouts of caches around the world and enables people to find them.

Geocoin- coins used by geocachers for others to discover and use in prescribed ways. For example, the finder might have to take the coin to a new, specified cache. For Irish geocaching, see http://www.geocachingireland.com/