For the final assignment of BCM240, I have to conduct a digital storytelling project. To be honest, I personally do not really understand the term ‘digital storytelling’ thoroughly. I only consider it in a really simple way: tell stories in digital ways, or through digital forms. Therefore, I want to broaden my knowledge in this field so I did a bit of research. According to EduCause 2007, “digital story telling is the practice of combining narrative with digital content, including images, sound, and video”, which is pretty similar to my understanding. However, the article also mentions a need for “a strong emotional component”, which I consider one of the elements to make the content more interactive with audience.
Another thing I want to discover is the importance of digital storytelling. As stated by Educause 2007, oral form of transmitting information has set the foundation for people’s communication and digital storytelling “builds on this model by incorporating rich, dynamic media“. It is essential to exploit all the benefits that the digital era brings about to make the content conveyed more informative, lively and therefore, persuasive. We are living in the media convergence era when digital infrastructures spread contents across various media platforms to reach a massive amount of audience (Jenkins 2006). Therefore, digital storytelling enables interaction between people with different backgrounds as it breaks many barriers such as geographical or cultural.
Among a huge range of topics, I am interested in the field of culture since I am living and experiencing a totally different culture rather than mine. As an international student, I consider adapting to a new environment with many differences is both a challenge and a chance. Since I arrived at Australia, I started to realize the importance and significance of stereotyping as a whole region can be recognized through just one stereotype (Palladino 2013). Moreover, stereotype, either negative or positive, can be a big problem for our society’s development (Robles 2013). Therefore, I am developing a project focusing on spreading both my Asian origin as well as Western (Australian) culture. In this way, I am able not only to tell my own stories but also to help others like me to overcome and adapt more easily to their new environment.
I decided to choose the Vines genre to work on my project as they are easy to make because I do not have to use any complicated devices rather than my own smartphone to record (Taylor 2013). Moreover, with a relatively short duration (counted in seconds), people are not hesitant to watch or even replay several times so they will be more engaged with the content (Sydell 2013). The short duration also boosts my creativity of how to pack a certain amount of information effectively. With such amateur style of making, I can connect more easily to my viewers as they can see something not to strange but rather familiar to them because ‘capturing the now’ is what everybody does on a daily basis.
As suggested by Levit 2013, two of the easiest way to spread culture is to reach out local media and a culture social media group. Therefore, I will focus on my own social media relationships as well as university community to conduct this project. In particular, I will choose Facebook as the main platform to upload my contents. Although Youtube is the most dominant platform for video sharing, Facebook is really potential with a huge number of users (Sahakians 2015). I can also exploit my existing relationship network on Facebook to disseminate my content more effectively. Facebook is also very interactive which helps me to create a ‘storycircle’ (Couldry 2013) as my content will be put in a circulation circle when people share it. I also use Twitter to spread my project because I can connect directly to my classmates as we both use a same hashtag (#BCM240) for our tweets.
Couldry, Nick, MacDonald, Richard, Stephansen, Hilde, Clark, Wilma, Dickens, Luke and Fotopoulou, Aristea (2015) Constructing a digital storycircle: digital infrastructure and mutual recognition. International Journal of Cultural Studies.
Educause 2007, 7 things you should know about… Digital Storytelling, Educause Learning Initiative, viewed September 8th 2016, <https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7021.pdf>.
Jenkins, H 2006, Welcome to convergence culture, The official blog of Henry Jenkins, viewed September 9th 2016, <http://henryjenkins.org/2006/06/welcome_to_convergence_culture.html>.
Levit, A 2013, 5 easy ways to spread the world about your culture, American Express, viewed April 19th2016, <https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/5-easy-ways-to-spread-the-word-about-your-culture/>.
Paladino, V 2013, Hilarious stereotype maps cleverly reveal cultural differences,Wired, viewed April 21st 2016, <http://www.wired.com/2013/07/mapping-stereotypes/>.
Robles, J 2013, Stereotypes: a big problem in our modern society, viewed April 20th 2016, <https://medium.com/collection-of-essays/stereotypes-a-big-problem-in-our-modern-society-4137a916b2c6#.99doymt0w>.
Sahakians, S 2015, 10 quick wins for getting started fast with Facebook video,Buffer, viewed April 20th 2016, <https://blog.bufferapp.com/facebook-video>.
Sydell, L 2013, How vine settled on 6 seconds, NPR, viewed April 21st 2016, <http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/08/20/213846816/how-vine-settled-on-6-seconds>.
Taylor, C 2013, What makes vine so hot ?, Mashable Australia, viewed April 20th 2016, <http://mashable.com/2013/01/29/vine/#VCKRfIEwigqV>.