Lundby (2008) in ed. Lundby (2008)
September 21, 2011 This book summarises the most current thinking in the (academic) field of ‘Digital Storytelling.’ Many of the practitioners in it take guidance from the method established by Lambert et al at the Center for Digital Storytelling. Lundby’s introduction contains useful definitions and operating language used in the field, especially his discussion of mediatisation versus mediation.
But before I get started, ‘Digital Storytelling’ is defined as such:
“Small-scale as a media form”; they are “short” and made with “off the shelf equipment”, where professional technique isn’t expected; the stories themselves are made by the narrator and focus on “the narrator’s own, personal life and experiences.”
“Digital Storytelling is a bottom-up activity. It is a ‘user-generated’ media practice. Digital Storytelling is performed by amateurs and not by media professionals. So-called ‘ordinary people’ develop the necessary competences to tell their own stories with new digital tools.”
Where a distinction is made between “ ‘lay productions’ on sites like YouTube or MySpace” where Digital Storytelling projects are usually organised externally by an institution (for example, museum, media organisations, community centers).
The field is the practice of facilitation.
(n.b. if you'd like to read it for yourself, click on the link above)
Main Points:
In this introduction Lundby summarises the book as well as the current thinking in the field. I will summarise his summary of each of his divisions.
Small Scale Stories
The stories that come from digital storytelling are not meant to be professional. They are usually first person narratives made with “off the shelf equipment” by regular people organised to share their stories none too infrequently by larger organisations and institutions to which they belong.
The practice of the Center For Digital Storytelling in Berkeley (California, USA; hence CDS) is one of the founding institutions of this practice and have facilitated the production of over the years 12,000 stories.
“ ‘Storytelling’ implies shaping of the story as well as the sharing of it with others afterwards. It was the Internet that expanded the space of Digital Storytelling— it offered new options to share the ‘classic’ small-scale stories created in story circles.”
The stories remain small in scale but in practice now can be shared more widely.
‘Small-scale’ also refers to the ‘story-circle’ or the safe space created by the facilitation course. Traditionally it was this space that CDS resisted removing stories from.
Much of what happens in social media can be thought of as Digital Storytelling, though there is some debate if these should just be called ‘personal media practices.’ Lundby especially notes that he likes Couldry (in Lundby 2008, or this book) definition that includes in DS (Digital Storytelling) “ ‘the whole range of personal stories now being told in potentially public form using digital media resources.’ This is a suitable definition for this book.”
Giving a Voice
There is recognition within the field that the main takeaway of DS is that it is meant to be above all else “self-representational media”. It is often linked to social justice organisations and issues but sometimes not, but rather ethnographic in nature. Though part of the point is to share the self-represented narrative, democratisation and enfranchisement aren’t necessarily givens as extension of DS.*
*As Dr. John Dovey claims that i-docs have specific an outlet as activism.
Self-representations
An individual, first-person narrative doesn’t a complete picture paint: self-narratives produced under a DS practice are meant to be context based (or should be viewed with an awareness of context).
Lundby citing many others writes:
“Self-representational stories may appear authentic. This, however, is an assumed authenticity… A person could have many stories to tell. The authenticity of the digital story is not a given. To play with narrative is to play with identity.”
Lundby cites Waite (2003) discussion of how digital communication technologies alter self. Self-introspection study by Giddens (1991). As well as Livingstone (2008), who quotes Mead (1934):
“fundamental distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ as twin aspects of the self, social networking is about ‘me’ in the sense that it reveals the self embedded in the peer group, as known to an represented by others, rather than the private ‘I’ known best by oneself.”
The point he’s making is that though these narratives are self-representations they are indeed representational and often performative.
Digital narratives
Digital media processes facilitate the storytelling and the sharing and “the possibilities of narrative co-production and participation”.
Digital Storytelling is rooted in the process.
Recommends the Friedlander chapter on authorship and authority, and the McWilliam case study chapter.
Challenging Institutions
As a practice DS challenges traditional media, has the ability to give agency to stakeholders, challenges the informal and formal learning dichotomy.
Multimodality — semiotic transformations
“The new media capacity of prime significance in the production of Digital Storytelling is the multimodality offered by digitisation. Composition across modes is nothing new…. Multimodality need not be digital at all, but through digital technologies multimodality is made ‘easy, usual, “natural” ‘ … Multimodality or digital remix is the key to understanding the types of narrative that are created in Digital Storytelling.”
DS is not oral storytelling, oral learning, not compositing. Digital nature of DS allows storytellers to remix narratives and objects for their own purposes, to fit their own self-representation in that narrative context.
Narrative transformations
The interactive capacity of DS is as vital a component that describes and allows for DS as multimodality is.
Institutional transformations
Institutions in the DS field are conceptualised as “concrete” and Lundby gives an example of schools, or not so concrete: education, socialisation, media.
“Digital Storytelling may imply transformations of or within the context in which it operates.”
Of particular interest and mention is the work that Hjarvard has done by examining the institution of ‘media’ and how it relates to the practice of DS.
In this section Lundby also gives a useful definition from Hjarvard of ‘mediatisation’.
“ ‘A process through which core elements of social or cultural activity (like work, leisure, play, etc.) assume media form’ (Hjarvard, 2004, p. 48, 2007).”
He distinguishes between two forms that can happen in combination (or not): strong and weak; where strong is interaction with a medium and weak is where
“the symbolic content and the institutional activity are ‘influenced by media environments that they gradually become more dependent upon and interconnected with.’ “
In this context, storytelling is mediatised when it is in digital form.
Mediatisation or mediation?
In Lundby’s mind mediatisation and mediation are both “processes are intensified by digital media with their capacity for semiotic, narrative and institutional transformations.”
He explains that leading area scholars Hjarvard and Couldry disagree about which term is correct and their meanings. Lundby writes, “Couldry prefers the concept of mediation to grasp the social and cultural transformations due to the role of media.” He calls Couldry’s view “one-eyed”, saying that Couldry bases his justifications on “tendency to claim broad social and cultural transformations from one single media type.”
Lundby writes that Hjarvard’s perspective is that “mediatisation generally, ‘denotes the process through which society increasingly is becoming dependent on the logic of the media’ … ‘Mediation’ for him refers to communication and interaction through a medium in a particular setting, where the message and the relation between sender and receiver may be affected. Analyses of mediation focus on how the media influence both message and relation between sender and receiver.” Lundby calls this point of view “representation” and “narrow”.
He concludes that for each of Couldry and Hjarvard, the basis of their disagreement is found thus: “the narrow definition of the other’s main concept is focused on representations.”
Tension and mediation
In this section Lundby summarises chapters of the book and asks us to be aware of institutions in which digital stories find themselves, especially in the practice or process of telling: interface, socio-cultural, organisational, communities, etc.
What’s important for my research:
Digital Storytelling is performative; publicly created contributions to interactive documentaries are performative.
What I’m doing— soliciting publicly created contributions to tell a story fall less in traditional, adheritive form to DS and more like ‘lay productions’ as I’m not in the room with people, not establishing a relationship of trust in person, not training anyone on narrative or film production techniques, and certainly not supplying anyone with equipment. However, for my work I wish to extend or make an analogy from DS to digital journalism. And indeed, Lundby writes that some in the field recognise that digital storytelling could be extended to self-representations in social media. Via social media — thus videos uploaded to a particular space to tell a particular story, tweets — we represent ourselves to each other. Participation in digital storytelling and Digital Storytelling is performative.
Digital stories are told with an ‘audience’ in mind; that is, there is a context and an institutional framework.
That digital stories are told with an audience is an observation from practitioners in Lambert (2002) as well. But the point is an important one, and one that Lundby recognises as well. In DS practice, the resulting stories are often solicited, they are called forth for a specific purpose and exercise. As Lundby writes (see above), that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are authentic or unbiased — just contextualised. We weave narratives for audiences at different times with different purposes. The same stories can mean different things in different contexts. We all exist within frameworks and telling a story as such at a particular moment in time carries with it temporal and institutional awareness. This is an extension of the point above, that digital storytelling even in ‘lay productions’ is performative. The Mead (1934) in Livingstone (2008) is very useful:
“fundamental distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ as twin aspects of the self, social networking is about ‘me’ in the sense that it reveals the self embedded in the peer group, as known to an represented by others, rather than the private ‘I’ known best by oneself.”
Digital Storytelling is as it is because of the medium and technology surrounding it.
Once again, content and form feed back on each other. I believe the point Lundby is trying to make (in opaque and irritating academic language) is two fold: DS exists as a field because technology enables the stories to be told in a particular manner, likewise that those stories wouldn’t be told unless that technology enabled those stories to be told in that particular way. Internet based social media and the formation of online communities extend both of these points. Secondly, because these stories are told, the institutions to which the story tellers belong will be influenced by the presence of the stories in ‘public’, where those stories are now told and part of the dialogue surrounding an institution and may not have been told otherwise, if the institution itself wasn’t engaged in a digital space.
Mediation versus mediatisation
I think it’s worth considering these terms and their varied meanings (between Couldry and Hjarvard) with an eye on how form and content of story telling, indeed how institutions are influenced and changed upon their interaction with each other.
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