Volume 6 (2013): Issue 1 (January 2013)

This article describes how - in the processes of responding to participatory storytelling practices - community, public service, and to a lesser extent, commercial media institutions are themselves negotiated and changed. Although there are significant variations in the conditions, durability, extent, motivations and quality of these developments and their impacts, they nonetheless increase the possibilities and pathways of participatory media culture. This description first frames digital storytelling as a ‘co-creative’ media practice. It then discusses the role of community arts and cultural development (CACD) practitioners and networks as co-creative media intermediaries, and then considers their influence in Australian broadcast and Internet media. It looks at how participatory storytelling methods are evolving in the Australian context and explores some of the implications for cultural inclusion arising from a shared interest in ‘co-creative’ media methods and approaches.

This paper examines co-creative video outputs that have originated from, or relate to, remote Indigenous communities in Australia. Scholarly work on remote media has mostly operated at the interface of media studies and anthropology, seeking to identify how cultural systems shape the production, distribution and reception of media in Aboriginal communities. This paper looks instead at content themes, funding sources and institutions during the 2010-2013 period, and examines the factors that may be determining the quantity of co-creative outputs, as well as the types of stories that get produced. I argue that the focus on culture has obscured important shifts in remote media policy and funding, including a trend towards content designed to address social disadvantage.

Forming peer alliances to share and build knowledge is an important aspect of community arts practice, and these co-creation processes are increasingly being mediated by the Internet. This paper offers guidance for practitioners who are interested in better utilising the Internet

The decision not to capitalise the word ‘internet’ in this paper is based on the consideration that digital networks that use the Internet protocol suite, TCP/IP, have become ubiquitous means of sending and receiving communications.

Drawing on a design experiment I developed to promote online knowledge co-creation, this paper suggests three development phases – developing connections, developing ideas, and developing agility – to ground six methods. They are: switching and routing, engaging in small trades of ideas with networked individuals; organising, co-ordinating networked individuals and their data; beta-release, offering ‘beta’ artifacts as knowledge trades; beta-testing, trialing and modifying other peoples ‘beta’ ideas; adapting, responding to technological disruption; and, reconfiguring, embracing opportunities offered by technological disruption. These approaches position knowledge co-creation as another capability of the community artist, along with co-creating art and media.

Participatory digital culture presents major challenges to all traditional media outlets, but it presents very direct challenges to the community broadcast sector, which was established from the outset as local, community-driven and participatory. These and other issues were the focus of a recent forum at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne (Co-Creative Communities, 8–9 November 2012). The forum was part of a national research project, which has been exploring how Australian community arts and media organisations are responding to participatory digital culture, social media and user-led innovation. Focusing on the organisations that presented at the symposium, the paper examines how community-interest media is making the most of new and social media platforms. It considers examples of participatory digital media that have emerged from the community broadcast sector, but it also considers local, collaborative, community-interest media projects developed by public broadcasters and organisations involved in arts, social justice and development. Drawing on forum transcripts and follow-up research the essay describes some of the key trends shaping how community-interest media organisations and independent producers are working with participatory digital culture, and with what success.

Networked identity work is the conscious negotiation or co-creation of identity, enacted by speaking and listening across differences among multiple publics, including those real and imagined, familiar and unknown, on and offline, present and future. It is a concept I explore extensively in research with queer Digital Storytellers who share their personal stories in public places to catalyse social change (Vivienne 2013). In this article I consider distinctions between ‘story’ and ‘identity’; ‘networking’ and ‘networked identity work’ and argue that the two concepts may be usefully employed in development of co-creative community projects. Finally I consider how variable definitions of co-creativity influence project development.

Digital storytelling is an international movement for self-representation and advocacy, especially in educational, arts, and therapeutic communities. It has begun to attract a significant body of scholarship including publications and conferences. Australia has been an important player in all of these developments. In this presentation I explore some of the issues that have emerged for activists and scholars, including the problem of how to ‘scale up’ from self-expression to communication (i.e. self-marketing), and the question of the role that stories play in constituting ‘we’-communities (or ‘demes’).

The paper pursues the relationship between storytelling and political narrative over the extreme long term (longue durée), using well known and lesser-known connections between Australia and Turkey to tell the tale. It considers how digital self-representation intersects with that political process, and what activists need to know in order to intervene more effectively.

The paper is in five parts: (1) Gevinson; (2) Gallipoli; (3) Granddad; (4) Göbekli Tepe; (5) Gotcha? It seeks to place digital storytelling within a larger framework that links storytelling with the evolution of the polity. The analysis ultimately points to a looming problem for the digital storytelling movement – and possibly for human socio-cultural evolution too. In the crisis of ‘we’ communities that arises with the possibility of a globally networked polity, we need new guides to storytelling action, not the old (Trojan) warhorses of mainstream media. Events such as the centenary of World War I present unexpected opportunities for this kind of exploration.