Scope

Research Questions

Stories and storytelling are essential features in human communication.  The story represents a cognitive and social basic structure.  But how stories are shaped and expressed, and with what signs, tools and media they are told, vary considerably.  MEDIATIZED STORIES, then, studies fundamental aspects of communication and culture and at the same time something distinct new:  The project offers an opportunity to investigate new forms of storytelling in contemporary society. 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.

Self-representation through digital storytelling

Self-representation in digital storytelling emerge in a variety of forms, e.g. in blogs (weblogs) and personal home pages or diaries on the Internet, produced in designated workshops for television, museums and groups, or told with picture cell phones to be shared among friends.  Digital and networked media offer new means and modalities for the creation and communication of stories.  ‘Storytelling’ here implies shaping as well as sharing the stories with others.

In these digital stories people who tell them act as producers. The kind of stories as well as the digital means and modes to make them may vary considerably.  The wide range of available modalities of expression or articulation is a characteristic of the digital media.  The specific digital tools or machines that are selected are not of prime importance here.  The focus is on the stories and on how they are used by youth, and other age groups as well, to represent themselves in public or in interpersonal communication. The project relates to a Western setting, although the cases to be studied may be on the fringe of the successful life of youth portrayed in media and advertising.

Stories of self-representation, captured in digital media, become digital objects or artefacts, physically available as computer documents, on CD-ROMs, as attachments to e-mails, or linked to websites.  They become mediated stories, here understood in the sense that they are shaped and shared through artificial, technological, man made tools, signs or media. 

Stories have for centuries been mediated in writing.  All told stories, oral or written, are tools or artefacts. However, digital technology opens up a range of opportunities for representation with multimedia modalities qualitatively different from the modality of writing and the technology of print. With digital technology cultural objects could be shaped in infinite ways, and shared in multiple copies by an easy ‘click’.  The stories may be inherently shaped and shared with digital tools in ways that make them not simply mediated but mediatized (i.e. whose form is influenced by the possibilities and constraints of their mediated transmission and exchange).

Youth as innovators

Theories in sociology and education analyse socialisation among youth as reflexive work on formation of identities.  Youth are producers.  The focus on mediation and mediatization offers a new perspective on socialisation and identity formation.  Modernity in general makes questions of self-representation relevant and urgent. The new digital technologies offer tools to construct this self-representation in advanced ways that, at the same time, connect individuals in new social relations.  Subjective identity becomes an objectified, material artefact that others can interact with and manipulate.