Digital Storytelling: A Space For Silence to Speak and For Others to Listen

Origin of Digital Storytelling

In the 1970s and 1980s, the authority and ownership behind artistic expression was a central question amongst waves of political, social, and cultural upheaval in the United States. At the time, sharing one’s story through art was primarily reserved for the artistically privileged. Art practitioners and educators sought to challenge the perception that art was only for the talented and gifted. Unknown, new artists' creative contributions started a movement calling for more accessible and inclusive art. As new art surfaced, powerful, unheard stories caught public attention and amassed a call to expand creative involvement. With the emergence of the Internet and public access to other digital technologies in the 1990s, new tools for creative expression in digital media materialized. San Francisco natives Joe Lambert, a local theater producer, and Dana Atchley, a media producer/interdisciplinary artist, explored the powerful ways ordinary people could create impactful personal stories using new digital media technologies. With the addition of Nina Mullen in 1994, these three digital storytelling pioneers founded the San Francisco Digital Media Center with a goal of art that encapsulates cultural democracy and social change. Together, they would create a community workshop called “digital storytelling.” Digital stories are a short format digital media production using film techniques, videos recordings, audio, scanned photographs, and other non-physical media for everyday people to tell their story.    

Today, the San Francisco Digital Media Center is named StoryCenter and officially moved to Berkeley, CA. The innovative storytelling group reports: 

StoryCenter has worked with nearly a thousand organizations around the world and trained more than fifteen thousand people in hundreds of workshops to share stories from their lives. Through our wide-ranging work, we have transformed the way that community activists, educators, health and human services agencies, business professionals, and artists think about the power of personal voice, in creating change. (“Our Story”) 

Since the 1990s, digital storytelling has provided an approachable vehicle for individuals to discover the power of sharing their experiences with digital media. During his involvement with StoryCenter, Lambert released multiple books and guides on their method of digital storytelling. In Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community, Lambert states the StoryCenter developed seven elements to streamline the creative process, he explains, “Our  approach evolved  out  of  our  perception  of  what  would  provide  the  shortest  and  most  direct method to have someone invest in the power of their own story and complete an idea of an edit with a sense of “reasonable” satisfaction about their creative experience” (38). The seven elements are: point of view, dramatic question, emotional content, the gift of your voice, the power of soundtrack, economy, and pacing. Although the world of options for media expression is much greater than these seven, Lambert puts forth a solid foundation to build a digital story. 

Digital storytelling's potential expanded in the early 2000s with the launch of social sites where online communication could occur. Early emails, bulletin board forums, and online chatting services laid the groundwork for future social media companies. While early platforms like Six Degrees, CompuServe, Friendster, and Prodigy enabled online networking, weblogs and other publishing sites started to gain popularity. By 2003, Myspace launched and was a new way for people to connect, share music, create profile pages, and document their stories. By 2008, Facebook's popularity eclipsed Myspace, and all of the other social networks such as Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, Pinterest, and TikTok would rapidly rise to popularity (“The Evolution of Social Media”). Through these platforms, new ways of connecting stories or narratives thematically arose. For example, hashtags used on social media have become a ubiquitous part of Internet culture. Merriam Webster Dictionary defines a hashtag as "a word or phrase preceded by the symbol # that classifies or categorizes the accompanying text (such as a tweet)" (“Hashtag Definition & Meaning”). Whole digital storytelling movements have grown out of and utilized the categorization function of the hashtag. 

The #MeToo movement, a social movement to break the silence on sexual abuse and harassment, grew in popularity as women adopted the #metoo hashtag across Twitter by sharing one's story publicly. Tweets, videos, photos, and blogs attached the #MeToo hashtag creating a stream of digital storytelling and an empowerment movement that captivated millions. The founder of the #MeToo movement, Tarana Burke, started the MeToo movement work in her community for young Black women in Selma, Alabama. The explosion of its popularity from the hashtag even surprised her. She had no control over it. She reflects on the moment she saw the rise of the hashtag “#metoo” in her memoir Unbound, she says, "It was clear that all the folks who were using the #metoo hashtag, and all the Hollywood actresses who came forward with their allegations, needed the same thing that the little Black girls in Selma, Alabama, needed-space to be seen and heard. They needed empathy and compassion and a path to healing. I wanted to be part of making sure they had what they needed" (12). The power of digital storytelling continues to evolve as a place of empowerment and healing as it is implemented in classrooms around the world and at the center of many academic research studies.  

Digital Storytelling Research

With digital storytelling’s original intent of encompassing a democratic ideal, a new research study published in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods conducted in 2019 extends that mission. Stephanie L. Martin, a researcher in the Department of Educational Psychology and Special Education, at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, along with her team of researchers, lead a first of its kind study to explore digital storytelling as an empowerment research method with young women who have experienced dating violence (Martin et al. 2). They first held narrative interviews with a small sample of women, followed by a 2-day digital storytelling workshop. Martin et al. found “...that digital storytelling used as an empowerment research methodology that directly engages participants in the knowledge generation-mobilization cycle has the potential to propel individual healing, connect participants through communicating about their shared experience, and deepen societal empathy and responsiveness” (3). Thus, engaging participants in digital storytelling gave voice to a silenced, marginalized, and potentially vulnerable population of young women. As a site that empowers and heals women, finding spaces for the silenced online outside of the workshop environment becomes a challenge. How do we protect the voice of storytellers and keep them safe when sharing personal experiences online?

Many Digital Media researchers are exploring “safe spaces'' for marginalized women to share their stories online. Cultivating safe, communal spaces online for free and open expression is a priority amongst intersectional feminists. In Building a Digital Girl Army: The Cultivation of Feminist Safe Spaces Online, Rosemary Clark-Parsons, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School of Communication, explains her ethnographic fieldwork to trace the technical and discursive enforcement of safety and the role space plays in everyday lives of women in a Phildephia-based Feminist Facebook group, called Girl Army. Clark-Parsons describes the origin of safe spaces, she says, “the concept of safe space emerged in the late twentieth century in the United States with the rise of the “new social movements; the feminist, queer, and anti-racist movements…” (2128). As the Internet failed to live up to its utopian vision presented in the early 90s as an unregulated place for discourse, threats of online harassment and a rise of trolling, flaming, and cyberbullying continue to harm the safety of online communities (2126-2127). In an effort to combat online misogyny, a disciplinary rhetoric that silences women’s participation in the public sphere, The Girl Army Facebook group built a community rooted in womanhood and fostered a gender-specific safe place to “discuss current events, share resources, call for backup against online harassment, ask for advice, tell deeply personal stories, post feminist memes, support causes through online petitions and fundraisers, and organize offline meetups (Clark-Parsons 2126). Even with the best intentions to create a safe space for women, by virtue of being an online site, Girl Army moderators could not ensure absolute safety of its members (Clack-Parsons 2141). Clack-Parsons reveals the flaws in Girl Army’s ability to provide an ideal safe space to its community of women, she explains, “...(Girl Army) is safe but unsafe, inclusive but exclusive, open to but limiting of discourse, like all safe spaces, the group is always already incomplete, excluding some to focus on others, and imperfect, potentially reifying the social inequities feminism aims to transform” (2141). Not only did moderators fail to protect their members from external online harassment (compromising screenshots), but they also refused to be the inclusive environment they set out to be by barring the admission of trans men (privileging cisgender womanhood) to their group. Thus, how do we create truly safe spaces for marginalized groups? Clark-Parsons reveals from her findings that when it comes to safety online, “strive for safer spaces, always working from the assumption that no digital space can ever be truly safe for all participants at all times” (2141-2142). Alongside a concern for safety is the challenge of digital access and literacy amongst silenced voices in our communities.

Lack of digital access and literacy in rural areas limits the range of voices we hear from marginalized women online. First, what is constituted as rural? The United States Department of Agriculture says the following: The Census Bureau defines rural as "any population, housing, or territory NOT in an urban area.” Its definition of rural is closely tied to its urban definition. There are two types of urban areas: "Urbanized Areas" - population of 50,000 or more "Urban Clusters" - population of at least 2,500 and less than 50,000 and "Nonmetro" does not mean rural” (Flood). A growing digital divide between citizens in the U.S. limits individuals' voices online. The digital divide refers to the uneven distribution of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in society. The consequences of access and usage of computers and the Internet encapsulate a global divide, social divide, and democratic divide that reinforce social inequalities and cause a persisting information/knowledge gap (Schweitzer). The digital divide also contributes to a lack of digital literacy for women in rural areas. In Digital Literacy in Rural Women’s Lives, Jennie Vaughn et al. conducted a qualitative study looking at how rural women in the American South obtain access to digital technologies for reading and writing. They look at the challenges caused by the digital divide, at economies of access, including the financial factors that shape individuals' uses of digital technologies for reading and writing, at the strategies that the women used for gaining access to needed technologies, and the nature of sponsorship in digital, rural contexts (Vaughn et al. 26). After life history interviews with five women, Vaughn et al. conclude,  “One one hand, all of our participants acknowledge that they have struggled at times to get reliable access to the Internet, and that their communities are less connected than the nearest Urban centers. On the other hand, their responses do not dwell on the gap, rather, they tend to emphasize their sense of connectivity, and the strategies that they personally use to bridge the divide” (43). Many participants rely on sponsors in their community to help them grow their digital literacy. Librarians or teachers act as bridges to their success in engaging in digital media. As generations, such as Millennials and Generation Z, grow up in an image-saturated world, hope lies in an increasingly digitally-native landscape for more representation online. According to a recent Cisco report, by 2023, over 70% of the global population will have mobile connectivity. With 5G expanding rapidly in the U.S., this will only accelerate mobile usage (Cicero). Thus, there will be greater access to social media and web browsers for marginalized voices to engage in. Digitally documenting the underrepresented voices that make up our communities allows the silenced to speak. Even with generational, socio-economic, and locational challenges of digital access and literacy, grant-funded projects aid communities in understanding the importance of stories from their residents. 

Digital stories have the power to not only document personal narratives but build community. In Documenting Local History: A Case Study in Digital Storytelling, Suzanna Conrad spearheaded a grant-funded project at Monterey Park Bruggemeyer Library in Southern California where twenty-four community members were selected to “tell a personal or community story, which was recorded, edited, and published on the Web by library staff and volunteers” (1). By documenting stories from these community members, they were able to document pieces of local history, Conrad states, “Digital stories can illustrate not just personal history but also local history, and in the process utilize new types of media and methods of storytelling that differ from those traditionally utilized” (2). Conrad presents some challenges in collecting the stories, as the participants were not digitally literate or familiar with the digital storytelling method in order to create their own stories, so volunteers and librarians were responsible for recording and editing the stories by participants. She explains, “The challenge of working with these experienced storytellers presented itself when attempting to limit the story length, i.e., a fluid storyteller often had difficulty limiting their stories to less than ten minutes” (7). Conrad’s grant-funded project highlights that digital storytelling must be flexible in how it engages the storyteller (when digital literacy is not present). When working in our communities, different digital platforms allow for approachable ways to encompass and engage a vast spectrum of storytellers.  

Since digital storytelling’s inception at the StoryCenter, the prominence of social media platforms has revolutionized the way we construct digital stories. Social media extends the reach, engagement, and impact of stories online. It’s a participatory culture, where digital storytelling is a large part of social media users' daily life. Content is king.  For example, features on social media platforms, i.e., Instagram or Facebook, have short clips where users can create "stories" and add text, music, short video files, or stills to create a fifteen-second clip showcasing aspects of their lives. Aside from marketing products, showcasing exorbitant wealth, and creating pet’s online personalities, social media’s storytelling also has the power to be a space to lift silenced voices in our community. Humans of New York (HONY), a photoblog that captures the stories of everyday New Yorkers, amplify the voices of often-overlooked individuals that make up New York’s communities. Brandon Stanton, the founder of HONY, set out to gather 10,000 portraits of New Yorkers and plot them on a city map. The project soon evolved when Stanton started having conversations with his subjects (“30 Under 30”). He began to include short quotes and stories alongside his photographs. The response to his storytelling work went viral with millions of followers that, to this day, still tune in to meet another face and read another story about a fellow New Yorker. Stanton broke down social barriers and brought about social cohesion with single images and captions. The stories travel amongst a web of social networks: Facebook,  Instagram, and Twitter. As evidenced by HONY, the digital world has the potential to establish powerful platforms for storytelling beyond a traditional workshop, Facebook group, or community library, further elevating the undervalued narratives in our communities. 

Projects like Humans of New York also highlight the power of listening when considering Stanton’s popularity of an over 20 million person following. In a study conducted by Hannah Wheeler and Courtney Quinn, scholars in Sustainability Science at Furman University, they examined expressions of empathy within HONY to see how social media platforms foster empathy (to see if it could be transferred to engaging individuals to aid in sustainability practices). They measured and documented ways the HONY community expresses and shares empathic thoughts and feelings across sites of : (1) perspective taking, (2) fantasy, (3) empathic concern, (4) personal distress, (5) relatability, (6)prosocial action, (7) community appreciation, (8) anti-empathy, (9) rejection of anti-empathy (Wheeler 1). They note that as the Internet becomes more ubiquitous in our everyday lives, it is important to explore how social media can increase empathy and reduce prejudice. Instances of expressions of empathy from commenters on the posts informed their findings, they conclude, “We have demonstrated a link between virtual intergroup contact, virtual empathy, and acknowledgement of attitudes and even specific behavior (monetary donations) on the HONY blog. Our HONY case study of Vidal also provides support for research showing that people are willing to help an outgroup member that has been individualized, or personalized” (Wheeler 9). Creating spaces where people can take a stance of openness in relation to another person, text, or culture echoes Ratcliffe’s defined purpose behind listening. It is a moment of connection that aids our ability to see from another’s perspective. The more we can see, hear, and understand one another, the more potential we have in uniting our communities, countries, and world. When we leave others out, fail to listen, and silence them, we all lose. We lose a voice, we lose a perspective, we lose representation, we lose understanding, and, most tragic of all, we can even lose a life.