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Storytelling 2.0Daniel Meadows, a lanky middle-aged man with a boyish face, greets me at the door of the Blaenavon Workmen’s Hall in this former mining town about an hour north of Cardiff, Wales. Meadows is more than a little wound up. He got here a few minutes earlier to find a man with cases of vodka and beer wandering around the hall looking for someone to sign for the delivery. An empty storage room and a concession booth with rows of candy are locked, but the conference room where Meadows has set up more than $100,000 of equipment – 10 computers, two digital cameras, two scanners and a printer – has been unlocked all night. Meadows, a digital storyteller and photographer who teaches journalism and new media at Cardiff University, has installed the equipment for a BBC Capture Wales digital storytelling workshop. It’s something he calls “scrapbook television.” Digital stories tell personal narratives not just through sound, but with photography, music and film thrown into the mix. These two-minute videos take storytelling back to its democratic roots, and I’m not surprised that it has caught on in Wales. After all, this is the place that produced poet Dylan Thomas and children’s author Roald Dahl. Wedged between England and Ireland, Wales preserves tradition while embracing a tech-friendly future. The movement began in California in the early 1990s, when theatre artists started using the digital media coming out of Silicon Valley to tell the stories of regular people. Now digital storytelling has become a cultural phenomenon. Everyone from vloggers to Welsh grandmothers wants to tell their life stories. And the technology to do that is cheaper and easier to use than ever before. Joe Lambert, one of the founders of the movement, says digital stories let average people get past the “cultural gatekeepers” of mass media. Lambert is with the California-based Center for Digital Storytelling, which trained the BBC group. Digital stories are captivating, he suggests, because they engage all of the senses, the way a good film does. “If you could write in the same form that you dream, in Technicolor, then you would,” he says. “When people play with digital media, with video or Photoshop or Premiere [software], it’s like they’re playing with their dreams, and it’s spooky-powerful.” As we become more removed from traditional social circles, we want to tell our stories. (Lambert calls it “re-storification” – “like reforestation.”) “Digital storytelling is a provocative wing of a story revolution, but it wouldn’t matter without this other need to resocialize.” |
