Summary

Principal Objective

The project explores how people – youth in particular – use self-representation in digital storytelling to shape and share their lives, and tries to understand these processes through theories of mediation and mediatization across media studies and the field of education.

Sub-goals

• Undertake a theoretical clarification of contrasting conceptualisations of mediation and mediatization.
  
• Analyse the socio-cultural dynamics of mediation/mediatization when people shape and share their lives in digital storytelling.
• Analyse how self-representation in digital storytelling may build competence and media literacy through informal learning.

The project MEDIATIZED STORIES studies digital storytelling with theories of mediation and mediatization. Focus is on the use of digital storytelling for self-representation, where people apply digital tools to create stories from their own life or immediate environment to share with others. Such storytelling is emerging in a variety of forms. Digital media and the Internet offer new means and modalities for creating and sharing stories.

Since young people tend to be innovative in new media use, this project specifically studies such practices among youth (here 9–19 years). From a platform in cross-European surveys on how children and teenagers actually use new digital tools for interpersonal communication, the project will analyse a range of cases on self-representation in digital storytelling.

Such stories captured as artefacts or objects (e.g. on a CD-rom or on a web page) are digitally mediated. The project tries to understand digital storytelling through contrasting theories of mediation and mediatization: Media studies stress that the digital modalities could shape a story to an extent that make it a “mediatized” story. Media studies also stress that it is not the digital media themselves, but the processes of mediation they are involved in that matter, played out in contested social and cultural contexts. Mediation studies in the field of education shares the socio-cultural perspective but focuses on how people learn and work in mediated action and activities with the use of “tools” and signs as cultural artefacts.

The selected cases of self-representation in digital storytelling from around the world invite an interdisciplinary encounter on theories of mediation/mediatization that has not yet been undertaken. The project will further analyse the socio-cultural dynamics of mediation/mediatization, and study how self-representation in digital storytelling may build competence and media literacy through informal learning in mediation/mediatization processes.