For our other projects I had the idea lightbulb above my head right as we got started. For this project I had to delve deeper, give myself a greater challenge, and even more original then before (and trust me, if our class has produced projects that might be described as anything, they are original-not to mention ingenious).
Originally, no pun intended, I had meant to do something on the answering machine/phone booth program hosted by NPR. In the program listeners call in and tell their story, whether it be about a military experience, a loved animal, a relationship etc. I understood that these stories were personal and thus similar to digital storytelling techniques. I wondered how NPR had an effect on how they were told. It didn't go deep enough and it didn't have enough in common, for me, with the true medium of digital stories.
I watched about fifty digital stories on websites ranging from BBC's capture Wales to smaller scale projects produced for the sake of Southern California history. I checked out vlogs on youtube, personal tweets, and Facebook. I was having trouble finding a theme. While drowning in the sea of digital storytelling I had two ideas.
The key word in the previous sentence is drowning. Digital stories, both in their true form and even more so in vlog (etc) form, abound on the web. I began to see what Nick Couldry was saying in his article in the Digital Storytelling book. In the article, "Digital Storytelling, Media Research, and Democracy: Conceptual Choices and Alternative Frontiers", Couldry expresses his concern that digital stoytelling is doomed to remain an isolated phenomenon, "cut off from the wider distribution of social and cultural authority and respect". He also discusses the democratic potential of digital stories, whether they truly have this potential or whether there are too many problems with scalability for this potential to be realistic. I wanted to look into this. Because the stories exist in such copious amounts, but also because they are isolated and lack expertise, I feared that the democratic potential and ability for these stories to really give voice was greatly challenged. I began to theorize, however, that the stories might be able to overcome this and realize their potential is they attempted to combat the issues of scalability, address questions of expertise, and create some cohesion.
Next I realized that I wanted to address digital stories told in the vein of something pertinent to today. I decided on job loss, with the recession and extension of unemployment benefits in mind. I found a huge amount of these stories and selected a few. I compared and contrasted vlogs on youtube with more traditional digital stories lead by an expert hand. I created a blog and posted the chosen videos, looking for similarities and differences and questioning the ideas of whether they empowered, were democratic, gave a voice, or had real substance or weight. I did not use the traditional academic method of writing paragraphs to break and examine the videos. I found that, for me, this writing method did not work online as it did on paper. I wanted something more accessible and something allowing for more freedom of the viewer/critique of my blog. I decided to put in faux chats at the beginning of my blog and then sprinkled throughout, I created a fake facebook feed in which people question digital storytellings problems, I posted twitter messages from people lamenting job loss. I titled my blog Redundant stories in order to call attention both to the idea of redundancy as it is used in terms of job loss (in several countries "to be made redundant" means to be fired) and the idea that perhaps many of these stories are redundant, that they exist in too superfluous a nature. I found this method of writing or providing textual analysis to be more accessible, more fluid, and more likely to maintain attention and spur thought of readers.
In order to address the question of whether these videos can garner respect and have democratic potential I posted clips from the film "Up in the Air". The film, about a man who professionally fires people, included clips of real people who really got fired telling their stories or reenacting their reactions upon being let go. I believe that the fact that these digital stories appeared on a blockbusting, academy award winning, film said something about the potential. If digital storytellers, real people, could make their stories more accessible or if the media actually took interest, maybe their potential could be realized. Furthermore, the clips from Up in the Air gave hope. The hope that many of these people have when they make these stories- that someone will notice, that they will have some effect, that they will perhaps create change.
To conclude my video I made a vlog of myself. I filmed myself talking about finishing my digital story and acted similar to those who had been fired. I highlighted the themes of the vlogs and digital stories in my own tongue in cheek/semi-real analysis of my project. I wanted this to be included for reasons of self-reflexivity, to give a face to the name of me as the author, to provide cohesion with the form of digital stories and the idea of textual accessibility.
