The Self and the Institution The Transformation of a Narrative Genre

Abstract

Media researchers have not been much preoccupied with a genre named Digital Storytell - ing. Since its origin in the early 90s, it has spread from California to the rest of the United States and has been evolving for several years now as a media practice around the globe. I therefore want to draw more attention to digital storytelling, here understood as a specific genre developed at the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) in California and defined as a short, first-person video narrative that combines voice recordings, still and moving images, and music or other sounds (www.storycenter.org). Such storytelling is regarded as both a movement and a method; and it is in its idea a short personal story, about the self. In the subtitle of his book Digital Storytelling , the leader of the center, Joe Lambert, highlights that this type of narratives are Creating Community through Capturing Lives of individuals (Lambert 2009). This genre is embedded in a democratic and empowering ideology. Along these lines, the main concern of this article is to discuss whether a change can be observed in the digital storytelling genre from an individualistic perspective to a more collective perspective – a shift from narrating selves to narrating communities. In examining this question, this work draws upon 45 films produced by bachelor students at the University of Oslo in 2010 and 2011.