This article is based upon a paper delivered at the international Digital Storytelling conference ‘Digital Storytelling in a Time of Crisis’ in May 2014, in Athens, Greece (
Looking at it a different way, surely the global ageing of population should be seen as a success story for humanity. Is it not the case that longer life expectancy is generally regarded as a key indicator of an improved health status of a population?
The crisis, though, is nothing to do with ageing – it is about paying for ageing. “In the developed world, population ageing tends to be regarded as a crisis because older people are frequently viewed as a costly burden. The common myth is that they are frail and non-productive.” (World Health Organisation, 2000). Added to the notion of ‘burdensome’ old age are the narratives of blame – what Lynne Segal calls ‘generational warfare’ or ‘boomer bashing’ in her wonderfully insightful book
Segal also points out that dominant narratives associated with ageing focus on ‘resilience’ stories in which we postpone the ageing process, or they swoop upon the state that is our greatest fear, in which we face cognitive deterioration. Dementia is clearly a growing concern, as greater numbers of people become afflicted because they are living longer, however it is not a foregone conclusion that we will
Whilst traditional gerontology focuses largely on the physical states associated with the chronology of ageing, humanist gerontologists have, over the last twenty years or so, shifted the focus to exploring
So, returning to the ‘crisis’ narratives: are spending, service and policy decisions relating to ageing drawing significantly on the input and insight of those who have first-hand experience of what it is like to be old? In this digital age, in which not only are public services and information increasingly shifting to digital platforms, but so are the fora in which to ‘have your say’, are the micro-narratives of older people able to penetrate the plethora of personal narratives available through social media platforms and online campaigns? Can Digital Storytelling as a process ‘give voice’ to older people – and which older people? More importantly, if digital micro-narratives are produced by older people, are they being listened to – by the right people, by enough people? Does Digital Storytelling as a movement provide a prominent enough platform for personal, individual stories to gather the momentum required to become the stories relating to the group ‘older people’ – the stories that will influence or change policy, practices and perceptions? As Hartley (2013: 71) discusses, how do we address ‘the problem of how to “scale up” from self-expression to communication… and the question of the role that stories play in constituting “we”–communities (or “demes”)’.
As a teacher and a practitioner of participatory media for some thirty years, over the last ten years, Digital Storytelling has re-kindled some of my early personal drivers for working in this field. My politics were strongly influenced by the Marxist theorists shaping the curriculum of my film and theatre studies minor course at university in the late 1970s. Using semiotic analysis to challenge the Leavisite traditionalist approaches favoured by my English Literature major course, my dissertation focused on working class novelists of the 1930s – I wanted to write about the form and content of the stories of those who were not in the great canon – the stories of ‘ordinary people’.
Media Studies as a subject to be taught in schools and colleges as well as in Higher Education, was emerging at the beginning of the 1980s and I was part of the second year’s intake of London University Institute of Education’s Post Graduate Certificate in Education training to teach English and Media Studies in secondary schools and further education In England, Further Education refers to colleges which teach and train people from the age of sixteen upwards. They differ from Higher Education, as their curriculum includes both academic and vocational subjects, and ranges from basic education to, in some institutions, an alternative place in which to study for a degree or higher-level vocationalqualification.
Digital Storytelling is a means of self-expression brought about through a process of deep reflection, shared with others in the Story Circle. It is an international movement of practitioners from across the globe, using facilitated workshops to ‘enable ordinary people to tell their own stories using digital means of production, editing, archiving and distribution (Hartley 2013; Lambert 2006; Meadows et al 2006; Hartley & McWilliam 2009; Lundby 2009). As the movement has gained the attention of academics, it is growing a body of scholars who are focusing on Digital Storytelling, as pointed out in Hartley’s article in Volume 6 of this journal (Hartley 2013: 72) Hartley cites Thumim 2012; Chouliaraki 2012; Couldry et al. in addition to earlier works referenced above, including his own jointly edited volume
Now there have been five biennial international conferences in Wales, Australia Norway and Turkey, with the sixth planned in 2015 to take place in the United States. In addition, there was the International Conference on Digital Storytelling in Valencia, Spain in 2012 and the Digital Storytelling in a Time of Crisis Conference, at which an earlier version of this paper was presented in May of this year (2014) in Athens. It was at this conference that Joe Lambert, founder of the Centre for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley California, referred to us (practitioners
It is this feeling of being part of a movement that has re-awakened those original – if naive and romantic at the time – drivers of my early career days. There had been some years in between in which my youthful idealism almost had imperceptibly shifted into cynicism, my energetic engagement with ‘the struggle’ slid into the weariness of just trying to make a living and dealing with the burdensome bureaucracies of the institutions in which I worked. The first time I engaged with Digital Storytelling back in 2005, I remembered why I had started.
Now I see my Digital Storytelling colleagues at conferences; we collaborate across borders on international projects; we connect, share and ask for help on our Facebook DS Working Group The DS Working Group Facebook group is an invitation only group of 460 members at the time ofwriting.
In the Introduction to the Fourth Edition of
As I approached my mid-fifties, being part of this movement enabled me to reignite a passion for work. At this stage in life, it feels good to belong to something that seems to have such a profound impact on those who facilitate and upon those who participate. I gave up a well-paid but deeply unsatisfying job to turn all of my attention to developing and delivering Digital Storytelling projects.
At the same time, in 2013, I was awarded a PhD Studentship at Middlesex University, London. This has provided the opportunity to immerse myself fully in Digital Storytelling as the focus of my investigation. It has also led me to having to ask some difficult questions of the very practice that feeds my soul.
This is the title of my research. Why the focus on older people? Partly it was through involvement with the project ‘Extending Creative Practice’ (
Unsurprisingly, the ageing agenda provides funded opportunities for research and projects that address the needs of older people. However, the reason for proposing the research is not simply opportunistic. I have a particular interest in the uses of Digital Storytelling with people who are living with dementia, and their carers. That is a nod to my late father, who lived with dementia for some years, but lost his ‘voice’ rapidly when he was absorbed into a nursing home environment, where listening – at all, to anyone – was not on top of the priority list. I had a gut feeling that digital stories could be tremendously powerful in terms of influencing care provision, providing opportunities for carers to share their stories with others as they progress through their journeys with loved ones, or with patients or residents in care homes. The groundbreaking work of Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner in Patient Voices’ (
Perhaps the other reason for focusing on ageing is to do with the life-stage at which I find myself. Losing both parents between 2007 and 2009 re-positioned me in the family tree. Perhaps it was when I noticed that, when completing surveys, in the commonly used age groupings I seem to have only one more to go! An observation by a speaker at an event in London to present ‘Festival In A Box’, one of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Cultural Value projects,
Segal (2013: 62) points to the proliferation of memoir writing and other forms of autobiography in both scholarly and popular domains during recent decades. In delving into writings about old age, I find that there is another question, which challenges the original research proposition with its stated focus on older people:
Barbara Frey Waxman, literary critic, in her study of autobiographies of ageing people
As a practitioner, responding to funding opportunities leads one into a set of languages that enable funders to identify what problem they want addressed – people, or beneficiaries, are often categorized into ‘target groups’, defined by their status as marginalized, or disadvantaged, or ‘at risk’. Many EU-funded programmes have used 65+ as the point in the age timeline from which ‘old age’ begins. We struggled with definitions during the pilot project Extending Creative Practice.6
None of these definitions is satisfactory. They are too … linear. The thing about undertaking academic research, which is both positive and challenging, is that the mindset shifts from responding to a pre-determined agenda that is set by, say, funders or commissioners of projects to present a solution, to a state of critique and questioning, to defining one’s terms from a different perspective. You shift from answering questions to posing them. Relentlessly.
Many Digital Storytelling interventions state that their aim is to ‘give voice’ to those whose voices are not normally heard. I have certainly made that argument myself when applying for funding to run Digital Storytelling projects with excluded or marginalized communities. Tracey Dreher’s article “A Partial Promise of Voice” (2012) highlights the limits of Digital Storytelling “and of the social inclusion category of voice” (p.157). She goes on to argue for greater ‘political listening’ in media research policy and practice if the promise of voice is to be even partially fulfilled. This echoes Couldry’s work (2010) on the value of voice, in which he argues that there are many opportunities for voice, but not necessarily for listening. ‘A system that provides formal voice for its citizens but fails so markedly to listen, exhibits a crisis of political voice’. In discussing Digital Storytelling in development contexts, Jo Tacchi (2009:170) also questions the audibility of voice. “Such voicing may be encouraged but nevertheless not be heard. Participatory approaches may themselves turn out to constitute ‘top-down’ participation, where participation constitutes ‘insiders’ learning about what ‘outsiders’ want to hear, or simply an exercise in administrative task-sharing or the necessary rhetoric to do with funding”.
Matthews and Sunderland (2013) point out that there is little or no written evidence or academic research into the use of digital stories themselves. They also highlight the lack of attention that has been given to ‘the parallel acts of listening – across various and many contexts – that needs to occur if we are to hear, value and respond to people’s self-documented lives and experiences’. They view digital stories as, potentially, ‘large-scale multimedia qualitative datasets’ which could make stories, if they were gathered together, ‘listenable to policy makers’ (p101).
Listening can often be taken for granted. Indeed, ‘Listen Deeply, Tell Stories’ is the mantra of the Center for Digital Storytelling. Yet, as O’Donnell, Lloyd and Dreher (2009) point out, in the analysis of story-based practices within the field of cultural studies, listening is under-discussed in comparison to questions of voice.
There is no shortage of observations, such as Rossiter and Garcia’s (2010:,49) “participant produced digital stories constitute a rich an relatively unexplored source of qualitative data”. There are many pockets of evidence in the form of project evaluations and reports and localized examples of impact, such as the remarkable effect of the work of Patient Voices referenced earlier in relation to Digital Storytelling with people with dementia. In a recent project, Patient Voices used digital stories they had produced with mental health service users to influence the trustees of Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust, who were addressing poor patient and staff satisfaction survey scores in relation to dignity, respect and communication. Two years into the project, digital stories are now shown at the beginning of every Board meeting and in staff recruitment and selection interviews ‘to remind staff and Board Hardy, P and Sumner, T, presentation as part of the Global Mental Health Exhibition, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, October 8th 2013.
In a project entitled ‘Piloting Digital Storytelling and Action Research as an Approach to Stimulate Pro-environmental Advocacy and Behaviour Change’, funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), undertaken by the University of Bath, the over 50’s age-group was identified as ‘an untapped source of potential pro-environmental advocates who might influence other people towards increased environmental action’ (Collier, Cotterill et al. 2010). The project looked not only to Digital Storytelling as a means to ‘give voice’ to older people in a new and engaging way, but also to draw upon the wisdom of their experience that could be captured in their digital stories, that could ‘build momentum for pro-environmental change within audience groups across communities and age groups’. The sample of older advocates was small – eight people – however the key findings demonstrated that digital stories were found by all audiences to be ‘authentic and accessible, and almost universally agreeable’. ‘The stories represented the views and activities of the older generation in a different and palatable way to younger audiences and in a valid, affirming way to those of a similar age’ (Collier, Cotterill et al. 2010: p.3).
This exemplifies the potential for using Digital Storytelling to represent older people and to influence change across generations. It looks to the stories of the participants to influence the now and the future – not simply to reminisce about the past, which seems to be the focus of so much participatory arts activity with older people. It counters what Jan Baars regards as an ”overall loss of respect for ageing, to the point that understanding and ‘dealing with’ ageing people has become a process focused on the decline of potential and the advance of disease, rather than the accumulation of wisdom and the creation of new skills” Baars, J. (2012)
However, it also begs some crucial questions: could a project like this project be upscaled to capture more ‘digital wisdom’ and create a pool of older online advocates through Digital Storytelling? What could be the long-term impact of such a project, on the participants themselves, on perceptions of older people across generations, on the influence of the stories to promote behaviour change – the original purpose of the project? The evaluation stated that the pilot project ‘showed promising potential, but their effectiveness to build lasting change could not be measured’. The tendency for project evaluations to stop at the same time as the project is an ongoing problem in terms of really capturing evidence of benefit. The requirement to measure results, outcomes and outputs against a project’s original aims and objectives can miss benefits or impact that may not come to light until a significant period of time after the project has completed.
A further issue with projects is that they are often one-off interventions funded by external agencies, whether they are governmental, independent trusts and foundations, private companies (corporate funding) or European, confining any research (whether this is action research, or simply project evaluation) to the specific requirements of the funding stream. If a project is about the digital inclusion of older people, for example, the outputs and outcomes, the key performance indicators may well have been designed within the project application by the applicant and approved as measures of success by the funder.
An oft-used, but true statement ‘the plural of anecdote is not data’, (widely attributed to Frank Kotsonis) underpins the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Cultural Value Project (see Interim report now available: Crossick, G. & Kaszynska, P. (2014) ‘Under Construction: Towards a framework for cultural value, Cultural Trends, 23:2, 120-131.
My research intends, similarly, to develop a framework specifically to measure the benefits of Digital Storytelling with older people – both the process of participation, the longer-term impact on individual participants and the value of the stories themselves. The intention of the research is to draw upon a range of disciplines across the Humanities and Social Sciences, such as the work of Katherine Riessman, in order not only to analyse the content of an individual’s story, but to consider also
Extending Creative Practice was a project funded by the European Education and Culture Lifelong Learning Programme GRUNDTVIG 2010. It was led by DigiTales Ltd., which used Digital Storytelling with older people with the primary aim of increasing their ICT skills to promote digital inclusion. The project partners were Laurea University of Applied Science in Finland, Mitra, an NGO in Slovenia and the Progress Foundation in Romania. In Finland, Digital Storytelling was undertaken with older people who attended day centres; in Romania the project took place in libraries; in Slovenia, the project took place within a community setting and involved some intergenerational work, as did the Finnish project. In the UK, as lead partner, DigiTales provided the ‘train the trainer’ workshops. The evaluation, which was undertaken by the Centre for Urban and
Community Research, Goldsmiths, University of London, revealed that not only had key objectives been met, but that a further emerging theme that was revealed was a reassessment of the place of older people in society through their Digital Storytelling. Rooke and Slater (2012, p.21) state “while it is important to acknowledge older people’s pasts and personal histories, the risk of a focus on reminiscence is that it can symbolically locate older people in the past, as ‘living history’ ”. They go on to observe that the Digital Storytelling methodology enables us to challenge attitudes:
The project – and these findings – raises some crucial questions. How ‘digitally included’, then’ are the participants in this project after one experience of making a digital story? If, as Couldry points out, “having an online narrative presence itself becomes expected of well-functioning citizens” (2010: p382), does participating in a Digital Storytelling workshop do the trick? Moreover, is that enough to enable an older person to develop an individual ‘digital voice’, a ‘digital identity’? What constitutes digital identity? How does Digital Storytelling empower older people to engage with the ‘now’, comment on current events, lend their wisdom to today’s debates by participating in a digital arena through the medium of story?
One answer to this lies in whether it is possible to sustain access to Digital Storytelling
As well as leading me personally to want to undertake deeper research into working with Digital Storytelling and older people, the success of the project also prompted the original partnership to regroup and develop a follow-up project that would ripple beyond the immediate participating partners.
The aims of Silver Stories are to extend Digital Storytelling with older people to two new countries (Denmark and Portugal) and to work with those who are undergoing training (students), or who are professionals, or volunteers specialising in the care of older people, whether they are active and in community settings, or in residential care homes. The project includes research into existing examples of the use of Digital Storytelling in higher education or vocational education, the design of quality assured accreditable modules in Digital Storytelling and the piloting of those modules through 40 workshops across the partnership. The ambition is to integrate Digital Storytelling into the training of professionals working with older people, either to add to their professional toolkit for use when working in the field, or as a reflective learning tool during their training period.
The project started in October 2013 and concludes in September 2015, by which time we will have tested the potential for inclusion of Digital Storytelling into the training of existing staff and those who are about to enter the health and caring professions. The project will conclude with an international conference hosted by IPL in Portugal to disseminate the results and showcase the digital stories produced at the end of May 2015, as well as an exhibition at the University of Brighton in August 2015.
The planned legacy for the project addresses some of the issues of sustainability mentioned earlier, especially one-off interventions and lack of longitudinal research potential, by integrating Digital Storytelling within Higher Education institutions who are training professionals to work with older people. All three Higher Education institutions in the partnership in the UK, in Finland and in Portugal have greater capacity to develop longer-term research using Digital Storytelling than smaller organisations which do not have the infrastructure to deliver beyond contract-based projects (however the partnership between Digital Storytelling specialist organisations and larger Higher Education institutions do seem to be mutually beneficial, judging by the progress of Silver Stories to date).
As Digital Storytelling in Romania in libraries has become a well-spread service that is offered as part of the libraries’ main provision, Silver Stories provides the potential through embedding Digital Storytelling within the training provision offered by Higher Education institutions for similar extended activity with older people to take place beyond the lifespan of the project across the partnership and beyond.
When I first began on my PhD journey, it was a difficult switch. As I started out, revisiting literary and narrative theories that I had not really touched for thirty years or so and finding some academic writings near impenetrable, I had the distinct feeling of going in ever decreasing circles. I have had to learn to ‘read’ again. Switching from fundraising or consultant mode continues to challenge. At the beginning, I felt that it was so much more purposeful to identify a funding opportunity, read the guidelines, find the partners, make a case for support identifying a need and proving that my proposal would provide the outcomes required in the language of the funder’s agenda. Post submission, a period of a few or many months would pass before either a red light rejection or a green flag to go ahead and deliver the Digital Storytelling workshops I love to do. Why change that?
The Extending Creative Practice project demonstrated that certainly in Romania, facilitated Digital Storytelling workshops that are now on offer as part of mainstream library provision across the whole country, can be a sustainable model. However, we need to ask some questions about provision and purpose. If Digital Storytelling is always available, is there enough focus, enough drive to result in meaningful experiences and powerful stories that can be used to effect change – at whatever level, small-scale or for the greater good?
As my research progresses, the act of questioning, challenging and constructing new ways of assessing the benefits of participating in Digital Storytelling for individuals, in trying to find a way in which to gather stories and identify their value more broadly and in contributing to the development of the Digital Storytelling movement is something that feels timely and worthwhile. How do we get beyond the paradox of the movement and the method’s capacity to ‘give voice’, whilst being so often dependent upon one-off funded interventions
Hartley is right – digital stories, as we define them, do not tend to go viral and sometimes they remain offline, depending on the wishes of the storytellers. However, we need to assess the impact on individuals, both storytellers and the audiences with whom they share their stories in individual and community settings in a way that reaches beyond the anecdotal.
As a practitioner, I remain firmly convinced that Digital Storytelling is an important social movement and that, perhaps, large-scale change is not where its ambitions should lie. As a researcher, I am looking for avenues of inquiry and theoretical approaches that will enable me to reach beyond conviction and anecdote.
And slowly, and hesitantly, I am finding my academic voice.