Storytelling in a Web 2.0 World: Digital Aesthetics and the Politics of the Everyday

• In Event: Roundtable Session 125
  In Roundtable Session: Multimodal Composing Processes Across Contexts

Abstract

This research traces the globally-oriented storytelling practices of 194 youth from India, England, South Africa, Norway, and the U.S. We examined 177 digital stories and films that students created and shared via a social network over three years to understand how their aesthetic practices of composing with digital media evolved. We found that the digital storytelling genre initially introduced was adapted, transformed, and replaced by new forms of digital narratives, as young people appropriated the ‘everyday’ as artistic subject, often for politically and ethically alert ends. While semiotic approaches to multi-modal literacy have been influential, our work also suggests that a conceptualization of literacy as artful practice, and art as a practice of sense-making, may be fruitful frameworks as well.

Authors

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

• Glynda A. Hull, University of California - Berkeley

• John Michael Scott, University of California - Berkeley