Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Living within a paradigm shift can be both unsettling and exciting. Most people reading this book (or this review) know the feeling. The editors explain:

Digital storytelling … emerged as part of broader cultural shifts, including a profound change in models of media communication. As contemporary societies move from the manufacturing industry to knowledge-based service economies, the entire array of large-scale and society-wide communication is undergoing a kind of paradigm shift, across the range of entertainment, business, and citizenship (4).

Digital storytelling represents “something of a social movement”. It is, quite simply, using user-friendly digital equipment to create and share an individual’s personal story.

Story circle workshops are a vital part of the movement. In such workshops a leader helps individuals in the group articulate their story by creating a script, selecting visuals, and producing the media presentation. As they work through this process together, the group becomes invested in each other’s story in a deeply collaborative way. When the video stories are shared at the end there’s hardly a dry eye in the group.

This opportunity for individual self-expression is where the digital storytelling power lies; just ask any Facebook or YouTube fan – or any blogger for that matter.

This volume is a helpful collection of chapters written by digital storytelling practitioners around the globe. Introductory chapters explain this phenomenon, its context in TV stories, and the global diffusion of this community media practice.

The foundational practices section includes an analysis of the Center for Digital Storytelling in California (“where it all started”) by Joe Lambert. This section also features the BBC digital storytelling project (“Capture Wales”), a visit to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and a look at radio storytelling.

Part III gives specific examples of digital storytelling in Euro-African life, in Brazil, Australia, Southeast Asia, Scandinavia, Belgium, Wales and London. The fourth part of the book explores emergent practices: in play, in China, with youth, in education and working with organizations and cultural institutions.

Zooming in on one particular chapter here by Knut Lundby can be helpful. Lundby is the editor of two other digital storytelling books I have found particularly rich (see references). His chapter in this volume is entitled “The Matrices of Digital Storytelling: Examples from Scandinavia” (176-187).

Lundby is professor of Media Studies in the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway. He was founding director of InterMedia, researching design, communication and learning in digital environments. He is also the Director of the international Mediatized Stories project focusing on digital storytelling among youth.

In his chapter in this book Lundby discusses culture and hegemony, referring to the “path-breaking” book by the Latin-American scholar Jesús Martin-Barbero: Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations. “To place the media – large- or small-scale – in the field of mediations is to place them in a process of cultural transformation” says Lundby. “Martin-Barbero made his cultural or counter-cultural argument for what would today be termed user-generated content long before that term arose and before the digital tools were available” (182). So mediation is key.

Lundby notes: “… digital technologies as new cultural tools may change the practices of storytelling” (185). New social media are dramatic proof as Facebook and YouTube have surprised us with their format, their openness, and their popularity.

This book raises for me a number of aspects of the global digital storytelling movement:

  • The role of digital tools and stories in journalism’s flux

  • The role of participation as a component of power – for the poor, the disabled, and women, for example

  • The impact of personal stories in building communities

  • The connection between digital storytelling and the dramatic global growth and power of mobile phone use, especially in developing nations

  • The application of this story model in classroom teaching and its potential in cross-cultural relations

Of course, as several authors in this book note, this movement takes us beyond literacy, beyond even media literacy (which trains us to critique media stories composed by others, rather than ourselves).

Daniel Meadows and Jenny Kidd, authors of a BBC digital storytelling project note in this volume that we have moved forward very little from the Raymond Williams definition of interactivity as mere reactivity. They conclude:

The challenge for the future is to have many more forms for people to use – video postcards, if you like – forms which are less difficult to master. ... mostly the tools that people need are the tools of empowerment – confidence, self-belief, and assistance with scriptwriting and skill acquisition (115-116).

References

Lundby, Knut, Ed. (2008). Mediatized Stories: Self-representation in New Media. New York: Peter Lang.

Lundby, Knut, Ed. (2009). Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences. New York: Peter Lang.