In looking at the work plan for this weeks assignment, I was drawn to the sentence “These approaches (stories) reveal deep relationship-building over time — skills that documentary filmmakers and community-based artists have been developing for decades, and are now taking online to mix old and new methodologies.” I realized I wasn’t familiar with the old methodologies or the history of storytelling. I did a quick search and found The Whiteboard History of Storytelling that gave me a much better insight.
We know Neanderthals for their visual storytelling of survival by drawing pictures in caves. We then move into verbal storytelling (mythology) as created by the Greeks and moving into the written word with the establishment of published books in Rome. These moved us from stories of survival to include stories of morals, mythologies, and philosophies. Stories then moved into the entertainment realm with theater as Shakespeare used storytelling on stage with a new approach of using words and theatrics to engage a wide variety of audiences. Time passes and we enter the industrial age where motion picture, radio broadcasting and television dominate the story world. This is when stories shifted to be predominantly in the hands of big business. The digital age and new media brings all of the methods developed over the many ages of storytelling and puts it back into the hands of the people.
This movement that we are seeing with organizations such as Scribe, Witness, Engage Media, The Interview Project, Mapping Memories and the Center for Digital Storytelling, is akin to creating a story telling democracy; a digital revolution in social equality if you will, where everyone has a voice and everyone can be heard so that the sharing of personal accounts can be a means for social change.
Perhaps there are a few variances between each of the organizations approaches but the core commonality of their missions is to provide knowledge (via frameworks and facilitation) and/or equipment resources to the storytellers in a way that will increase the likelihood of success. Success is defined of course by the storyteller, but a main focus on this platform is that they get audiences to view, respond and act. Never in history has the common person storyteller had a global distribution channel with integration networks that foster participation. This is in large, what makes this exciting revolution possible.
Another component that is a common thread in the modern day digital storytelling that we’ve been investigating, and an equally important measure of success, is in the process in addition to the product. I’m not entirely sure if this has been an outcome in other parts in storytelling history but the process seems to result in a strong cathartic or other growing experience for many of the storytellers that are using their own stories to instigate social change. This can happen as individual reflection, group support mechanisms, team processes and often in unanticipated ways. It’s through the process that the storytellers get to explore who they are, what their story is, how has the story shaped them, how to they work with others to tell this story, how does the collaborative processes shape them moving forward?
As the Whiteboard History of Storytelling says, ‘we have a compulsive desire to tell stories to one another’. The most promising aspect to this new platform that expands our story telling capabilities is that in the process, we can do it to heal ourselves and through the product we can do it to heal the world.
Your last sentence: Well said!
Yes, I agree with you that it’s exciting how these projects are putting tools for storytelling in the hands of those who don’t have professional media training! I’ve been thinking about the audience, too: it’s great that online stories have the potential to be circulated globally, but perhaps they can be just as valuable for being shared within a smaller, targeted community? That is, after all, how we tell most stories, and this structure seems to have migrated to the Internet.