Digital Storytelling

“Once upon a time…” has gone digital.   The Stony Brook University library describes digital story telling this way:

“Digital Stories are multimedia movies that combine photographs, video, animation, sound, music, text, and often a narrative voice. Digital stories may be used as an expressive medium within the classroom to integrate subject matter with extant knowledge and skills from across the curriculum. Students can work individually or collaboratively to produce their own digital stories. Once completed, these stories may be easily uploaded to the internet and can be made available to an international audience, depending on the topic and purpose of the project.”

Roland, C. (2006). Digital stories in the classroom. School Art,105(7), 26. (http://guides.library.stonybrook.edu/digital-storytelling)

From one point of view, digital story telling could be viewed as just another medium of expression, an enhanced multimedia experience to “wow” your audience and keep the attention of the attention-deficit “internet” generations.  Movie makers have been telling digital stories for years, and that medium certainly has its place.  Video game makers tell stories using digital graphics and sound.  Even “books on tape” are a crude form of digital story telling.  But, today’s digital story telling is truly a multi-media experience, and many young people are accustomed to this sort of communication.

But, from another point of view, there is something to be said for the value of a good story told in print.  Could you really take a masterpiece, like John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” and make it a digital story?  In form there is substance.  As Marshall McLuhan said, “The media is the message.”  In effect, the form of a medium is so intrinsically embedded in any message that it influences how the message is perceived, in effect communicating a meta-message along with the content.  So, digital stories have their place, but they are not a replacement for novels or short stories.  For example, although you could craft a digital story, illustrating Edgar Allan Poe’s “Pit and the Pendulum,” it would be wrong.  It was a story that was written for the theatre of the imagination, not to be limited by concrete graphics and sound.