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Article No. 6
Folk Media Meets Digital
Technology for Sustainable Social Change:
A Case Study of the Center for Digital Storytelling.
Emily Polk
University of Massachusetts,
Amherst USA
Keywords:
Digital
Storytelling, Technology, Media, Social Change, Community, Participatory
Model
Abstract
This
paper analyzes the movement of oral and written storytelling practices to online
digital storytelling. It is the first comprehensive case study of the
globally-recognized Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS), focusing
specifically on how the CDS model of digital storytelling contributes to
sustainable social change while reflecting the media’s shift toward
citizen-based journalism. The paper engages the complexities, limits and
constraints of the participatory model as it informs digital storytelling,
and applies the four theoretical approaches to community media (Carpentier,
Lie & Servaes, 2003) to the digital storytelling movement to develop an
analytic framework for understanding how these stories can be used to give
a voice to the voiceless, raise awareness, increase education, and promote
democracy.
Introduction
For
as long as there has been language, there have been people who have used it
to tell stories. Whether they are elaborate fictions woven together by
many, or carved by one from the barest bones; whether they are tiny morsels
of truth told with a careful intent and purpose, designed to relay a
message, expose an identity, or nurture a community, it is not unreasonable
to suggest that the art and activity of storytelling is an ancient and
universal part of most of the world’s cultures (Hertzberg & Lunby,
2008). As something that transcends time and space, the implications of
storytelling’s transformation into digital mediatized form calls for some
deeper exploration specifically as it concerns its contribution to
sustainable social change. By “sustainable social change” this paper refers
to a lasting process of empowerment and transformation that aids in the
reduction of poverty and makes possible greater social equality and the
larger fulfillment of human potential (Quebral, 1975).
The
first part of this paper will analyze the movement of oral and written
storytelling practices to online digital storytelling, and look at two
examples of digital storytelling projects in Africa. Digital stories are
being used as a tool in activist organizing and education, as a technique for
increasing understanding of social stigmas such as people living with
AIDS/HIV and as a way for victims of trauma and violence to speak out about
their experiences (Silence Speaks, 2009). Digital storytelling’s growing
popularity suggests that it is part of a larger shift in the media industry
toward grassroots, citizen-based journalism in a new public sphere.
The
second part of the paper will analyze the ways in which the participatory
method and multiplicity model inform the process of creating the digital
story by exploring these critical questions: To what extent can the digital
storytelling movement be participatory if the model is based on a unified
structure developed in the West? How are cultural differences addressed
during the story telling process? For example, in some cultures the
experiences of abuse and oppression are private and never spoken about
publicly. What are the access issues in relation to the distribution of a
digital story particularly in the developing world? Who is going to see it?
What are the best ways to know and or measure its impact?
Finally,
the third part of the paper will demonstrate that the four theoretical
approaches to the definition of community media (Carpentier, Lie &
Servaes, 2003) may also be applied to the digital story telling movement
(and by movement, I refer to the content, production processes,
distribution, and viewing audience) in order to situate digital
storytelling within a framework for analysis and to demonstrate support for
the idea that the application of digital storytelling in a community and
its subsequent effects, will always be in relation to the community itself
(cultural), and the relation that community has to the larger society,
state, market and structures of power.
The
Center for Digital Storytelling: Pioneering a Movement
The
most globally-recognized model of digital storytelling was pioneered over
15 years ago by the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) in Berkeley,
California. CDS is an international non-profit training, project development,
and research organization dedicated to assisting people in creating digital
media stories by partnering with community, educational, and business
institutions to develop large-scale initiatives using methods and
principles adapted from their Digital Storytelling Workshop. The center also serves as a
library of information and resources about storytelling and new media
(storycenter.org, 2009).
It is
important to note, that although this paper focuses on one model of digital
storytelling, there will never be one way of measuring the effects of
digital stories on a community, since just as the stories are
multiplicitous and contingent upon the narrator’s personal experience, so
too are the ways that one will be able to measure the effects. Nick Couldry
(2008) notes, “We should not expect a single unitary answer to the way the
media transform the social since media themselves are always at least
doubly articulated, as both transmission technology, and representational
content (Silverstone, 1994) in contexts of lived practice and situated
struggle that themselves are open to multiple interpretations or
indeed to being ignored.” (p. 42)
What
is a “digital
story?”
For
the purposes of this paper, the concept of a “digital story” will not be
separated from the process of creating it. A digital story can mean many
things. The term ‘digit means number and originates from the word finger
and counting on the finger (Bratteteig, 2008). Digital also means, “being
represented in a digital electronic system, a computer” (Bratteteig, p.
273). Cisler (1999) refers to the process of
digital storytelling as a combination of traditional storytelling
techniques, sometimes combined with live performance techniques, and with
the use of multi-media to provide sound and video to supplement the spoken
word. “In some creations, everything is online, and the listener or
computer user, explores in a non-linear fashion the mix of narrative,
photographs, video clips, and sound archives. The act of creating this can
be a single artist working with her computer equipment and memories, or it
can be collaborative” (para. 23).
Nick
Couldry (2008) refers to digital stories as the range of personal stories
now being told in potentially public form using digital media resources…online personal narrative formats such as MySpace and
Facebook, textual forms such as weblogs (blogs), the various story forms
prevalent on more specialist digital storytelling sites or the many sites where
images and videos, including material captured on personal mobile devices,
can be collected for wider circulation (such as YouTube) (p. 388).
One
example of a digital story which is featured on the CDS website is called Pralines
(http://www.storycenter.org/stories/). Created by 53-year old
lesbian Carol Burch Braun, the three-minute and twenty-three second story
opens with the soulful acapella song “You Shall Reap” by Marquez Rhyne and
a picture of David Duke, the grand leader of the Ku Klux Klan, whom Carol
says was the “first guy she went steady with.” The story, illustrated with
family photographs, is a haunting and honest exploration of the ways in
which racism and white supremacy shaped her family’s history in the
American south.
While it is impossible
to know the exact number of “digital stories” on the Web today, the Center
for Digital Storytelling alone, has worked with nearly 1,000 organizations
around the world and trained more than 15,000 people, in hundreds of
workshops. They have traveled to 45 states in the U.S., 5 provinces in Canada and 33 countries
to help organizations create their own workshop, production, and distribution
processes.
CDS
first came to fruition in the early 1990s when a group of radical theatre
performers and media artists led by Dana Atchley, Joe Lambert and Nina
Mullen, decided to explore how digital media tools could be used to inform
storytelling practices. Joe Lambert explained the roots of CDS in
dStoryNews (2000). “We wanted to motivate people to change their behavior,
to change policy, to change the distribution of power and resources. As
such, Digital Storytelling for us was more of an idea than a product, more
effecting social behavior than consumer behavior. Not that the two are
inseparable, quite the opposite, but the emphasis, for us, was on a simple
notion - The tools of digital technology should be used to democratize
voice and therefore empower more people than the prior set of analog tools
in contemporary communication” (para. 3).
Over
the years, their vision has grown into the Center for Digital Storytelling,
now based in Berkeley, California with workshops for educators, health and
human service agencies, business professional, and artists all over the
world. Its model for digital storytelling, known as the “Standard Digital
Storytelling Workshop,” is a three-day intensive where participants design
and produce a three to five minute digital story. They craft and record
first-person narratives, collect still images, video, and music with which
to illustrate their pieces, and are guided through computer tutorials that
enable them, with teacher support, to edit their own stories. CDS has
developed the primary curricula for creating digital stories, including the
Digital Storytelling Cookbook, the manual for the workshop
process, and Digital
Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community.
Silence Speaks Initiative
Silence
Speaks is an international digital storytelling project, housed in CDS and
founded by activist and storyteller Amy Hill, which focuses on stories from
“communities that have been denied a voice in decision making that affects
their lives, such as people living in poverty, survivors of trauma, those
who face social stigma due to chronic medical conditions” (Silence Speaks,
2009). Silence Speaks stories are used in training, community organizing,
and policy advocacy arenas to promote global health and human rights. For
the past nine years they have run workshops that “blend
creative writing, oral history, art therapy, and facilitative media
production techniques to assist people in telling stories as short digital
videos” (Silence Speaks, 2009). Silence Speaks employs a “Story Circle”
method: groups of eight to ten participants share personal experiences,
offer feedback to one another, and record individual voiceover narrations,
gather and/or create still images and video clips, and edit it into short
media pieces.
Over the last six years, Silence Speaks has conducted digital
storytelling workshops throughout Africa, partnering with organizations
focused on gender equality, migrant labor rights, child soldiers, and women
surviving obstetric fistula. Admittedly, the effects and consequences of
the various digital stories that resulted from these four partnerships are
too premature to be able to measure their contribution to sustainable
social change in their communities, (sustainable being the operative word).
However, the stories themselves may address the possibilities for social
change that are situated in both their content and the production and
distribution processes.
For the past three years Silence Speaks has worked with the
Sonke Gender Justice Network in South Africa. The organization works toward gender equality, and
toward reducing the spread of HIV and the impact of AIDS. Silence Speaks helped
to facilitate the production of digital stories of people in rural
communities living with HIV/AIDS. The digital stories produced through the
partnership have served as a counter to stereotyped representations of men,
women, and gender-based violence in popular media. The stories are
testimonials about survival; others challenge misperceptions about men and
masculinity and offer examples of the role both men and women play in
confronting forms of injustice (http://www.storycenter.org/cds_sonke.html,
2009).
For example, one of the stories featured under the “Legacies
of Violence” section on the Sonke Gender Justice Network website is Completed
Circles by Dawn Bosman (2007), a survivor of domestic violence. Black
and white and color photographs of herself, her home, and the South African
landscape flash across the screen while Dawn describes watching her mother
get beaten by her father and later reliving the cycle of abuse with her own
husband whom she finally fought back and left. The website where the story
is accessed has a note that the story contains explicit content and is
recommended for mature viewers age 14 and up and follows with key points for
viewers to consider, including ways of presenting the story to others. Silence Speaks helped to develop discussion
guides to go along with two collections of Sonke digital stories by youth
and adults (in English, or in Xhosa, Venda, or Tsonga with English
subtitles). Sonke screens the stories across Southern Africa as a way of
educating local communities, training service providers, inspiring
policymakers, and promoting sustained community action for change.
Digital storytelling as “public-oriented” citizen
journalism
This
example is consistent with the move toward a more public-oriented
communication model which utilizes new technology to displace the formerly
hierarchical, bureaucratic, and sender-oriented approach (Servaes, 1999)
with a more Freirian and Marxist inspired vision of a participatory, and
receiver-oriented approach. Freirian because the “oppressed” are treated as
fully human subjects with the authority and capacity to tell their own
stories, and Marxist because the power of the content itself may contribute
to fulfilling, at least in part, that the “human species has a destiny that
is more than life as a fulfillment of material needs” (Servaes, p.
84). In this instance, an argument may be made that digital stories,
insofar as their content may be used, shared, dispersed and replicated to
educate and dispel stereotypes in a community, that it is more valuable
than relying solely on traditional oral storytelling whose audience will be
limited to one time and space or than the mass media, whose messages often
come from a source outside the community, and are disseminated throughout
(Sparks, 2007).
While
the way in which each community interprets the digital stories will be
relative to each community, this is true too for the ways in which local
people from their communities view digital stories on the Internet even
when the story itself does not come directly from that
geographically-located community. The potential here for sustainable social
change is only just beginning to be explored. Drotner (2008) notes, “The
increasing range of communication channels available and the complexity of
their uses help push social boundaries of knowledge formation. Established
institutions such as the education system, the workplace and broadcast
media increasingly need to demonstrate their loci of socially accepted
discourses and legitimate meaning-making practices.” (p. 65)
When
applied in this context, digital storytelling contributes to a
reconceptualization of the notion of “community” which formerly referred predominantly
to geography and ethnicity as structuring notions of collective identity or
group relations (Wellman, Boase, & Chen, 2002). Now
that the Internet has made cyber-communities possible, digital stories
serve as part of the mirror and glue that both reflects and informs these
communities. Such communities that do not depend on geography to define
them, and who have used the CDS model for digital storytelling include
survivors of domestic abuse, children who have been through the foster care
system, and people living with HIV/AIDs. But the list goes on.
A
specific example is the Silence Speaks partnership with the International
Organization for Migration (IOM). With offices in over 100 countries, IOM
is a leading inter-governmental organization promoting humane migration by
providing services and advice to governments and migrants. IOM promotes
international migration law, contributes to policy debate, and the
protection of migrants' rights, migration health and the gender dimension
of migration. In 2007, Silence Speaks
collaborated with of IOM and Market Photo Workshop in the Digital
Stories: Migration Project. Eight men and women from countries in
Southern Africa told stories that highlight the issues and consequences of
labor migration (Silence Speaks, 2009).
In one story (accessed here http://www.youtube.com/iompretoria),
Thandiwe Dlamini, originally from Swaziland, describes her travels from
home to find work on a sugar plantation. Her journey is made more difficult
because she has HIV. She has limited resources for treatment and is treated
like an outcast because of the negative stigma associated with the disease.
After finally receiving medication, Thandiwe is able to return to work and
is surprised to find that “she is welcomed with open arms.” She ends her
story by encouraging others to not be afraid to get tested and to remember
that “there will always be life after HIV and AIDS.”
Participants like Thandiwe in IOM’s digital storytelling workshops
were provided with disposable cameras, taught some photography basics, and
asked to take photos of their homes and neighborhoods. In addition to
creating a safe workshop space in which labor migrants and family members
could share stories, the project developed a collection of pieces for use
in a variety of settings as education tools. A DVD featuring all of the
stories comes with a facilitator’s guide that can be used as an advocacy
tool to help raise awareness of the issues facing labor migrants (Silence
Speaks, 2009). From a grassroots perspective, making these stories
public online, makes them available to human rights and labor organizations
all over the world as documented real-life data to contribute to engaged
research. It also creates a space for the oppressed to speak on their own
terms and to be potentially heard by others like themselves in similar
situations around the world, thus aiding in the creation of aforementioned
communities.
Participatory Method and Multiplicity Models
It is impossible to analyze the framework for digital
storytelling without discussing the paradigmatic influences, particularly
on the process of digital storytelling itself. As a direct challenge to the
notion of mass media information dissemination, digital storytelling
signifies a representation from the contributor him/herself, distributed in
a public space that makes the story accessible to others in a way it was
never before. Daniel Meadows,
a photographer and journalism teacher,
coordinated the ‘Capture Wales’ project in cooperation with BBC Wales
(Meadows, 2003). A series of digital stories were shown on regional
television and several hundred are available at the BBC Cymru (Wales)
website (www.bbc.co.uk/wales/capturewales). Meadows notes, “Contributors are not just originating their own
material, for the first time they are editing it too. This is what first
excited me – and still excites me – about Digital Storytelling, for no
longer must the public tolerate being ‘done’ by media – that is, no longer
must we tolerate media being done to us…If we will only learn the
skills of Digital Storytelling then we can, quite literally, ‘take the
power back’. Not for nothing is the computer we use called the ‘PowerBook’.
‘Think Different’ the Apple advert tells us. Digital Storytelling isn’t
just a tool; it’s a revolution (p. 192).”
Meadows
(2003) reflects the participatory roots of digital storytelling, which is
echoed in the words of the Center for Digital Storytelling’s founder Joe
Lambert (http://www.storycenter.org/history.html,
2009): “Corresponding directly to the extension of civil, economic,
and political rights in the larger society, the community artists saw the
extension of technical and aesthetic training in the arts as a civil right.
They focused their efforts on providing arts access to this training to all
sectors of the population who were underserved by traditional education and
vocational training systems. At times the emphasis of such projects was on
personal voice and the development of identity, esteem, and resilience in
the individual; at other times the art making specifically addressed social
conflicts and broader political issues. This legacy is at the core of our
work.”
The
participatory model simultaneously incorporates the cultural identities of
local communities and democratization at all levels in the context of
working toward sustainable social change (Servaes, 1999). Taking its roots
from the Freirian concept that all people have the right to individually
and collectively speak their word, the participatory model replaced
industrialization and urbanization as the stepping stones of development
(Pearce, 1986). Along with these ideas came a shift in the perceived role
of the media. Its previous emphasis had been on “telling and teaching”
(Sparks, 2007, p. 58) but the new paradigm emphasized a more dialogic mode
of media development where the primary aim was no longer the dissemination of
information but rather creating media that became the voice of a
community rather than for a community (Berrigan, 1981). Digital
storytelling reflects this emphasis in the roots of the movement’s
development, and in the process of creating the stories themselves.
CDS as “Expert-Led
Media Pedagogy:” Animator and Advocate.
Although the founders of the Center for Digital Storytelling
address its roots in the participatory method, to what extent can the
CDS-inspired digital storytelling movement be participatory if the model is
based on a unified structure, exported from California? The equipment,
after all is provided by CDS; all of the narratives are largely under 5
minutes and many rely on music and photos to support the narration. While
the stories themselves are written by the people taking the workshop, the
workshop maintains a standard structure. Storytellers must learn the
techniques associated with the technology to be able to tell their story in
this way. McWilliam (2009) addresses the inconsistency between the
intentions of the movement and the reality of the top down expert-led
training: “Digital storytelling emerged as part of a wider shift away from
one-way, top down models of communication (traditional broadcast media)
toward two way, bottom-up models of communication (community and/or
participatory media)…Yet digital storytelling is inconsistent with either
model: it occupies a middle ground as a user-consulted, but expert-led
media pedagogy that developed through and alongside these emerging
technologies, but not because of them (p. 146).”
This
point is particularly relevant to digital storytelling’s role in the
context of media development. Hartley (2009) makes a similar argument that
engages the complexity of the theoretical paradigms under which digital
storytelling operates. Although he claims that digital storytelling fills a
gap between everyday cultural practice and professional media that was
never adequately bridged during the broadcast era by reconfiguring the
producer/consumer relationship, he argues that the dialogic approach to the
production of the digital story must acknowledge the asymmetrical
relationship between expert facilitator and amateur participant.
Such
acknowledgement addresses that this kind of self-made media may be in
reality only transforming the ‘authenticity’ of participants into the
‘authorship’ of the expert. He suggests that there cannot be an all or
nothing approach toward the process of making a digital story: Expert or
Everyone. Instead of choosing one paradigm over the other, he argues that
Digital Storytelling calls for both on the grounds that knowledge
production and acquisition is a dialogic process that comes from our
interaction with others. Here digital storytelling is consistent with
more participatory forms of communication for development in that it
rejects the linear model of communication and replaces it with one found in
dialogue (Hartley, 2009)—a dialogue which in this case, addresses the power
relationship head on, and perhaps even goes so far as to recontextualize
the role of the facilitator as “translator” versus “transmitter.”
Silence
Speaks addresses the process on their website by noting that participants reflect on their own memories and life
circumstances as well as on those of others in the group, thus building
connections and solidarity. The teaching is facilitative, storytellers are
talked through the steps they need to take. Collaborating partners are
on-hand to assist with all aspects of the process and to offer expertise in
healing, educational, or community organizing strategies. Local assistants
are also brought in to provide interpretation and support (Silence Speaks,
2009).
In
this instance, the digital storytelling movement can be seen as a micro example
of the macro communication for development process—a dialogic blend of
empowered participants with a story to tell and expert facilitators who can
aid in translating the technical and engage the “embodied and emotional”
(p. 193) experience. The facilitator oscillates between the role of
advocate and animator (Servaes, 1999)—advocate because s/he is acting on
behalf of the community, but is not necessarily responsible for thinking of
the ongoing process, and s/he is conducting a workshop with a standardized
structure; animator because the structure of the workshop demands the
facilitator’s “conscious involvement,” (p. 193) while creating a safe space
for the individuals to act on their own behalf, creating their own stories
in their own voices.
It
is worth noting, however, that there is no mention on the Silence Speaks
website of how differences in culture are addressed during the storytelling
process. For example, in some cultures the experiences of abuse and
oppression are private and never spoken about publicly. Additional research
could explore the cultural processes in greater depth as well as the extent
to which these storytellers want to make their stories public.
What is the reason that storytellers want to participate in these
workshops? Is the driving force one of social change? A belief that their
story will contribute to greater understanding and raise awareness around
an issue? Is there full understanding of the consequences if a personal
story is published online, in an environment where interactivity via
comments has become the norm?
Does
it matter that it’s digital: Internet access issues?
It
is crucial to analyze when and how digital storytelling on the Internet is
relevant to a community and when and how it can be used to contribute to sustainable
social change. This paper makes two arguments that address this. One:
Politically, insofar as one is concerned with contributing to new forms of
democracy, participating in a form of public media that is participatory,
self authored, and produced, digital storytelling plays an important role
in the empowerment of people who have before been
voiceless in the public arena. For example, dozens of Silence Speaks
stories that were published on the HUB, a participatory media site for
human rights where individuals, organizations, networks and groups around
the world can upload their videos, audio or photos, or watch, comment on
and share what’s on the site, have been viewed thousands of times by people
all over the world. Nick Couldry (2008) states: “One important
reason is that digital storytelling represents a novel distribution of a
scarce resource – the ability to represent the world around us – using a
shared infrastructure. Digital storytelling occupies a distinct stage in
the history of mass communication or perhaps in the supersession of mass
communication; as such, it has implications for the sustaining or expansion
of Democracy. (p. 54)”
The implications of these self-represented voices in the
public sphere cannot be explored fully without closer scrutiny regarding
who has access to the Internet. According to the CIA Factbook, as of 2005,
approximately 1,018,057,389
people use the Internet out of 6,790,062,216 people, which is less than 18
percent of the world’s population. In the U.S. alone, according to the CIA
Factbook, more than 225 million people use the Internet and the population
is more 307 million, which means nearly three quarters of Americans,
arguably the most powerful country in the world, use the Internet. These
numbers confirm that analysis of the success of these stories for promoting
social change should not be measured necessarily by how many people “see”
them, it should be measured by how much they influence the people who do
see them and who partakes in the process of creating them.
Although the era of top-down mass communication has often served to replace
the pertinent role of folk media in communities around the world, the
tenets of oral culture have actually returned to the technologically savvy
digital storytelling movement—and it is these tenets that contribute to
positive social change, in the content of the story itself, but more
particularly in the personal and community building process that goes into
production of the digital piece. While many scholars claim that digital
storytelling offers opportunities for new representation not to be confused
with the features of oral storytelling (Couldry, 2008; Lundby, 2008), this
paper argues that it is actually by returning to more traditional forms of
storytelling via digital means that sustainable social change becomes more
probable.
Digital
Storytelling and folk media
One
of the most ancient and useful forms of communication was the tradition of
oral storytelling whereby the collective memories, myths, morals,
histories, beliefs, victories and defeats of a community were passed orally
from one person to another, one family to another, one generation to
another. “Folk media,” a term applied to a type of information
dissemination that existed all over the world long before the written word,
incorporated this storytelling in the form of traditional music, drama,
dance and puppetry. Each society, race and religion used different kinds of
folk media to create, reflect, educate and entertain their community with
culturally specific and unique features relative to the context of the
group (Cisler, 1999). These traditional live communication processes served
many purposes. They contributed both to the preservation and transformation
of community identity, were effective in educating and building awareness
around issues important to the community, and were more often than not
sites for resistance and reclamation (Agovi, 1994).
Digital
Storytelling and Folk Media share two roots. One: they both may (but are
not required to) rely on art, song, and performance in the context of the
storytelling, and two: the story itself is subject to transformation via
the participation of a live audience or via the expectation of interaction
that is now reflective of a participatory new media culture. Axel Bruns
(2007) writes, “Before the emergence of the 'fixed text' model, textual
performance was re-creative, collective, and collaborative; we are now
returning to a similar textual engagement based on remix, sharing, and
mash-up. At either time, such reworking was based in performance built upon
performance: an ongoing process of reinterpretation and change; Elizabethan
theatre, then, was a pre-parenthetical mirror image of the cultural
processes we experience today. (para. 5)”
The
collective space created by the Story Circle as part of the CDS workshop
provides an opportunity for participants to share their stories in a
supportive environment, listen to others, learn new skills collectively and
individually, while providing and receiving feedback. Certainly oral
stories underwent transformation as they were passed from one person to
another, one community to another, as the needs and desires of the people
changed and evolved. So too do these transformations inevitably occur
inside these CDS workshops, as people listen to
and help one another.
It
is also important to note that the capacity for digital stories to
contribute to sustainable social change is not entirely dependent on being
published and viewed online. As mentioned earlier, copies of the stories
are often made into a DVD and accompanied by guides used to facilitate
educational discussions and/or screenings of the DVDs in the community.
This technological archiving of story and culture is something that can be
shared, replicated and dispersed throughout a community and used by
advocates to inform policy change, but does not depend on being published
online.
Digital Storytelling and the Four Theories for Community
Media
The last part of this paper is an argument for the
applicability of the four theoretical approaches to community media
(Carpentier, Lie & Servaes, 2003) to the role and purpose of digital
storytelling, as summarized below and in figure 1. This is important
because the four
approaches can be used as an analytical framework for exploring the broad
range of perspectives found in digital stories, and increase our understanding of the ways they can offer an
alternative for a wide range of hegemonic discourses (p. 52).
Although
it is not a prerequisite for digital stories to resist hegemonic discourses
in society, as is often the case with the development of community media,
the very act of producing and making a digital story public can in fact
serve this purpose. The four theories of community media are born from a
framework that acknowledges that identities are “relational, contingent and
the result of articulatory practices within a discursive framework”
(Carpentier et al. p. 52). The first takes an essentialist approach, and
argues that community media’s role is to serve the community from which it
originates. The second approach claims a more relationalist perspective and
views community media as an alternative to the mainstream. The third
approach sees the media as part of civil society, and the fourth approach,
inspired by Deleuze, sees community media as a rhizome, allowing the
incorporation of aspects of contingency, fluidity and elusiveness in the
analysis.
Digital
storytelling in the context of CDS’s model, draws direct parallels with the
first approach as both the process and the story is almost always oriented
“towards a community, regardless of its exact nature (defined
geographically/spatially or otherwise). A primary goal of the digital
storytelling workshop is to create a community among the storytellers,
where ideas and narratives can be exchanged, shared, discussed and created
in a safe space, in an environment where topics are not chosen by
“professional communicators” but indeed by the participants themselves. The
end result—the narrative moved to digital form—has the potential to create
and sustain communities via cyberspace, that are not bound to geography,
but can inform and nurture it nevertheless. This comparison becomes
potentially problematic when considering access issues, as not everybody in
the “community” may have access to the Internet, but here again it is
important to note that the digital stories are not being used just online,
but as part of educational and advocacy packages by NGOs in the local
communities, and as part of local screenings accompanied by guided talks.
The
second approach emphasizes community media’s relationship to the mainstream
media, and defines it as existing as a supplement or alternative voice.
Mainstream media is often viewed as large-scale, state or corporate-owned,
vertically-structured, voice of dominant discourse and representations
(Carpentier et al. p. 56). Community media can represent just the opposite:
Small scale, independently owned, horizontally structured with active
participation from the community, carriers of non-dominant discourse,
emphasizing self-representation.
The
digital storytelling movement has, at its roots, an emphasis on
self-representation. The stories are made using small-scale equipment,
which participants learn how to use during the course of a three-day
workshop. I am referring specifically to the standard model of digital
storytelling developed by CDS, however corporations have begun using
digital storytelling methods to communicate information and ideas to their employees
and for branding purposes (Pink, 2007). The fact that mainstream media
often imitate what was once perceived as smaller-scale media, independent
project is addressed briefly by Carpentier, et al. 2003: “At the same time,
the critical stance towards the production values of the ‘professional’
working in mainstream media leads to a diversity of formats and genres and
creates room for experimentation with content and form. In this fashion,
community media can be rightfully seen as a breeding ground for innovation,
later often recuperated by mainstream media.” (p. 57)
The
third approach views community media as part of civil society, holding its
position as the ‘third voice’ (Servaes, 1999, p. 260) between state media
and private commercial media. If civil society is to be defined as a group
of intermediate organizations, separate from the privately owned economic
organizations operating in the market economy, personal and family
relations, and from the state and quasi-state organizations, (Carpentier et
al. 2003), then community media’s relevance and connection to this civil
society remains crucial for democracy. If communication is a human right,
then community media is one place where that right is exercised and
opportunity for participation in the public sphere is realized. Digital
stories, when viewed through this approach are an active vehicle, removed
from the state and the market, with the potential to promote more authentic
forms of democracy by contributing an additional voice to the public sphere
particularly, the voices of people who have been marginalized and
oppressed, and who largely remain voiceless in the mainstream.
Finally,
the fourth and arguably most important approach builds on Deleuze and
Guattari’s “non-linear, anarchic and nomadic” (Carpentier et al. 2003, p.
61) concept of the rhizome and uses it as a metaphor to both “highlight the
role of community media as the crossroads of organizations and movements
linked with civil society.” (p. 61) This approach argues for the
contingency and elusiveness of community media, but recognizes the many
connections community media has to civil society, the market and the state
without having to lose its identity. Taking a less antagonistic (though
potentially idyllic) view, this community-media-as-crossroads approach
acknowledges the different types of relationships the media has to the
institutions that make up society and emphasizes the importance of the
movements of diverse oppressed people to come together in order to allow
the “common articulation of, for example, antiracism, antisexism and
anticapitalism,” (Mouffe, 1997, p. 18).
The rhizome approach’s applicability to digital storytelling
may be found more in the Center for Digital Storytelling itself than in the
stories they help to produce. As the central leaders in the standardization
of the digital storytelling model, CDS founded the roots out of which many
digital storytelling projects around the world have sprung. Their
workshops, because they bring together diverse groups of participants, each
with a different story to tell, also serve as a kind of crossroads between
many different narratives, contexts, and understanding of the world. The
center moves from various organizations—some bound by state and market
considerations and others that are civil society based in order to conduct
its trainings and produce digital stories from various groups in multiple
contexts, all under the populist-inspired artistic rubric of a standardized
digital storytelling format. The Rhizome approach may also be better able
to capture the complexity of relationships each storyteller has to the
content of his/her material, the culture from which she/he is speaking, and
the political and economic constraints that have surely informed her/his
narrative, in a way that is useful for understanding how the story can
transform the public sphere and society itself.
Figure 1. Digital Storytelling and the Four Approaches to
Community Media
1) Serving
11) An Alternative 111) Links
to
IV) Rhizome
the
Community
to
Mainstream
Civil Society
|
Ideas
and narratives are exchanged, shared, discussed and created in a safe
community space
|
Rooted in self-representation as opposed to media
professionals speaking for others
|
Independent from state and market forces and regulation
|
Digital storytelling is contigent upon the community and
elusive as long as it remains independent
|
|
Participants decide which stories they are going to tell and
how they are going to tell them.
|
Stories
are made using small-scale equipment, which participants learn how to use
during the course of a three-day workshop
|
Potential
to promote more authentic forms of democracy by contributing additional
voices to the public sphere
|
The Center for Digital Storytelling is connected to civil society, the
market and the state in various ways while still maintaining
its distinct identity
|
|
Narratives are culturally relative; process provides
opportunity for misrepresented,
disadvantaged, stigmatized, and repressed to benefit by having voice
heard
|
Because
the workshops do support various voices, the content is more diverse than
that often found in mainstream media
|
The
voices of people who have been marginalized and oppressed, and who
largely remain voiceless in the mainstream can use digital stories to
contribute their voice and experiences to the global picture
|
CDS workshops, because they bring together diverse groups of
participants, each with a different story to tell serve as a crossroads
between many different narratives, contexts, and understandings of the
world
|
|
DVDs and discussion guides around stories are used to raise
awareness and effectuate positive social change by and for community
members
|
This potential “breeding
ground” for innovation can lead the mainstream to copy it. For example
corporations are using digital stories to get their message across
|
The process of making and publishing a digital story is an
exercise of a human right to communicate
|
The digital stories, though each unique and culturally
relative can unite and inform others going through similar experiences
(domestic abuse survivors, immigrants, refugees, etc.)
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Conclusion
Digital storytelling is a mediatized transformation of a
timeless process and a product—the implications of which are just beginning
to be explored. At
the risk of sounding somewhat contradictory, I want to end this paper by
acknowledging Hartley’s argument that digital storytelling be used for more
than self-expression (2009). He warns that the cultivation of the personal
as sufficient ambition for the majority (while those ‘in the know’
disappear behind closed institutional doors) can lead to the very evils of
relativism that experts rail against, encouraging the general public to
believe that anything goes, that knowledge is only a matter of opinion, or
that self expression is the highest form of communication. (p. 208)
This
paper suggests that it is indeed possible to have both a democratic space
for the self expression of people who have heretofore been ignored and
neglected in the public sphere, AND to use the digital storytelling process
to generate new argumentation, new forms of journalism and new works of the
imagination. Hartley (2009) goes on to argue that digital storytelling
needs to be understood as an extension of the possibilities of knowledge,
even while their experiential self-expression may be an assault on
the closed expert system as such. He suggests that when large numbers of
otherwise excluded (or neglected) people are emancipated into the ‘freedom
of the internet,’ it will, if successful and if pushed beyond a ‘look at
me’ stage, assist not only in self-expression and communication but also in
the development of knowledge…” (p. 208) Further exploration is needed
of the ways this “development of knowledge” can be used to promote
sustainable social change.
By
focusing on the Center for Digital Storytelling
and its Silence Speaks initiative, this paper engaged the complexities of
the participatory model as it informed the intention behind digital
storytelling (but not always the reality) and situated digital storytelling
as a direct challenge to the notion of mass media information
dissemination, signifying a representation from the contributor
him/herself, distributed in a public space that makes the story accessible
to others in a way it was never before. The participatory model, building
on a Freirian notion that all people have the right to individually
and collectively speak their word, is reflected in the capacity for digital
stories to give people a voice in the public sphere who formerly did not
have a voice. Each narrator is responsible not only for his/her story, but
for producing it and editing it as he/she sees fit. Addressing the
inevitable expert/amateur binary in the context of the participant method
as it relates to the digital storytelling workshops becomes of crucial
importance in order to create the dialogic community required for the
process.
The
paper explored Internet access issues and made two arguments for digital
storytelling’s potential to contribute to new forms of democracy. One:
Engaging in a form of public media that is participatory, self authored,
and produced, digital storytelling plays an important role in the
empowerment of people who have before been
voiceless in the public arena. Two: Despite the fact that less than 20
percent of the world’s population has access to the Internet, it is
important to view the success of digital storytelling and its ability to
promote social change relative to the impact the stories and the process of
creating them have on the local community that is making them. The
Story Circles in CDS workshops share some resonances with oral storytelling
as do the digital stories themselves by incorporating music, drama, art and
poetry into the process of sharing and creating digital stories. Most
ancient societies, races and religions have used different kinds of folk
media to create, reflect, educate and entertain their community with culturally
specific and unique features relative to the context of the group. By
returning to that, we are also returning to more horizontal and
participatory forms of communication.
The
last part of the paper made an argument for the applicability
of the four theoretical approaches to community media (Carpentier et al.
2003) to the role and purpose of digital storytelling in order to begin to
develop an analytic framework for understanding the multiple ways these
stories can be used locally and globally to promote sustainable social
change—both in the potential for promoting a more authentic democracy in
the public sphere and in the local community-centered processes of creating
them in the first place. Storytelling—as art form, media text, and
practical means of communicating—will no doubt continue to endure the
cycles and various manifestations that come with changing times and
technologies. As we are decentered and transfigured by the multiple effects
of globalization, the implications of storytelling’s transformation
into digital mediatized form necessitates deeper analysis particularly in
the context of its potential contribution to sustainable social change.
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About
the Author
Emily
Polk is a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts and a fellow at the Center
for the Communication of Sustainable Social Change. She researches the
intersections of technology, journalism, globalization and human rights.
She can be reached at epolk@comm.umass.edu
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