This paper explores the use of digital technologies for creating meaningful histories about personal pasts with reference to the digital storytelling projects enabled by the BBC in the UK since 2002. In so doing, I seek to understand how a media institution (one that makes and re-makes history every day), the digital technologies (that promote accessibility, interactivity, convergence and designership), and the individual (who seeks to make sense of their lives) combine to produce digital stories. I position the paper around one central issue: changing approaches to digital media technology. I would argue that we are witnessing multiple reversals of phenomenology’s cube. First, digital storytelling renders invisible the rules, regulations, conventions, and discourses of professionalized broadcast media in order to make visible user-generated content. It makes invisible the high tech tools of, for example, a fully loaded AppleMac® so as to make visible the authenticity of a faded black and white photograph, close-ups of a frozen image, the rawness of sound filling space, and the richness of the human voice intonating a lost past. It makes invisible official histories of the national and collective consciousness in order to make visible the personal memories of a creative and experimental but ordinary individual. The paradox with digital story-telling is that the very tools that enable are the very tools that are meant to slide out of view. In fact, digital storytelling makers would quite simply argue that it’s not about and it should not be about the technology. Digital stories do not look digital and as such their practice does not fall so neatly under the headings of digital aesthetics or digital culture.

Consequently, digital storytelling requires a re-look at how digital culture has been conceptualized. Unlike Sean Cubitt’s rather gloomy take on digital aesthetics as a tension between histories/values and technologies/norms that is “experienced only as hurt and loss at the level of individuality, as modernisation and the overcoming of the dead past in the corporate personality,” digital storytelling provides one digital aesthetic practice that asks that we take control of the technologies in ways that speak to and about our histories in order to overcome hurt or loss. In using a simple combination of photograph, sound, and narrative voice, the BBC’s digital storytelling projects (http:// www.bbc.co.uk/tellinglives/) have sought to wrench media production away from the experts and to put the tools in the hands of ordinary members of the public: “Everyone has a story to tell and new technology means that anyone can create a story.” While there is a growing body of academic research on digital storytelling’s origins in California in the late 1990s, digital storytelling practice in the UK, and more specifically digital storytelling with the BBC since 2002, there is little work that seeks to analyse critically how digital storytelling pushes technology into the background in order to bring history into the foreground.

Clearly, the movement in digital media technology away from a whizz-bang approach of “let’s do this with the technology because we can” toward “what can this technology do for me?” has provided a new landscape for making personal histories meaningful. As digital storage capacity increases, software becomes accessible and affordable, and kits become smaller and more manageable, the turn toward user experimentation is inevitable. No longer are these technologies within the sole purview of professionals. Rather, the institution–in this case the BBC in collaboration with Daniel Meadows of the Centre for Journalism Studies, Cardiff University, UK–becomes enabler. While citizen media is not a new concept and the BBC has a long history of representing the ordinary lives of British citizens, this technological enabling is new and it raises challenges for professional broadcasting and the control and ownership of media content.

Furthermore, as the power to produce media content shifts, so too does a paradigm of history-making. The problem with history-making has often been that it is either made by those with the power to tell stories locally and globally or it is about those in power. In reaction to this, the rather European conceptualisation in the 1960s of a history from below—emanating from the people, by the people, and about the people—has been difficult to create. Powerful media institutions continue to insist upon legitimated discourses and practices of how to represent historical events, which stories are important, which images should anchor those stories, and how those narratives should be told. However, digital storytelling has provided a new landscape for making histories. Not the dominant historiography of aristocrats, governments, institutions, and political movements, but a truer embrace of Michel Foucault’s conceptualisation of popular memory, who throughout his oeuvre articulated a discourse on history-making that privileged working-class experiences. Yet, unlike the history from below and popular memory paradigms that quite easily fall into the trap of presenting the everyman as a unified identity, digital storytelling presents a diffuse audience “located in a matrix of economic, political and ideological forces in constant struggle.”7

The BBC’s Capture Wales project (http://www.bbc.co.uk/ wales/capturewales/) resides firmly within its public service broadcasting remit; the targeted audience is diffuse and generally not technologically literate. They are, however, located in a matrix of social issues such as industrial decline and regeneration, socialist politics, and low-income families, while being steeped simultaneously in a culture of Celtic language and myths, oral history, family values, and nationalism. Deliberately low tech digital storytelling is affordable and mobile media in comparison with professional broadcasting standards, and as such can mine the crevices of such a culture in personal and productive ways. The convergence of increasingly user-friendly technologies such as scanners, digital cameras, video cameras, audio equipment, and computers with the broadcasting capabilities of the internet means that the forums for hearing the voices of these people are everywhere. The BBC’s digital stories are not only archived on their website, where they are constructed into a manageable past, they are also broadcast on television through the Community Channel and BBC 2Wales. In ethnographically illuminating the practice of everyday life, the BBC is using digital storytelling not to fix and freeze the past, but to make it mobile and traverse media boundaries, capturing multiple audiences. This turn toward digital storytelling uncouples historiography from authoritative discourses and replaces them with the oral culture of history-making that the scholarly written word had delegitimized.

Moreover, in the context of televising historical events, Daniel C. Hallin has argued that television images pass quickly, leaving little time for reflection. Yet, this is not the case with digital storytelling. Embedded in digital media technologies are different memory processes of pause, rewind, watch again, listen again, search, collate, thread, montage, and archive, such that digital memory challenges us to rethink how history can be made and re-made. These different memory processes are also embedded in the convergence of television and the internet, allowing viewers to watch offline, access online, and interact with the stories by providing feedback on their favourite ones. Therefore, if digital technologies compress time and space, speed up everyday life, and refigure temporality such that we fear cultural amnesia, it is vital to note how digital storytelling uses these very same technologies to slow down our consumption of audio/visual schema. Andreas Huyssen has argued that our obsession with memory is “the attempt to slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution of time in the synchronicity of the archive, to recover a mode of contemplation outside of the universe of simulation and fast speed information and cable networks.” Moreover, the level of interactivity and skill acquisition that digital storytelling encourages in both audience-producers and consumers means that arguments surrounding a potentially passive audience can be sidelined.

Alongside a PC or AppleMac laptop with a fully kitted audio suite, this active media audience is skilled in digitizing their story through scanning, Photoshop, Premiere, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, and iTunes. Acquiring a new vocabulary of JPEGs, audio capture, dpi, USB and kHz in a matter of 1-5 days, the newly enabled digital story-maker uses the technologies and software not to demonstrate technical skills, but to offer a fresh understanding of the past, their past. While the BBC’s project encourages stories that are not specifically historical (clearly those of World War II are), the stories are all, in essence, concerned with personal memory and/or self-reflection. What is re-presentation if not about memory? The “high-tech amnesia” that Huyssen neatly opposes to the “struggle for memory” is here redeployed, as the high-tech is made low-tech and put into the service of memory.10 Almost all of the participants in the BBC’s project state that the computer skills they acquired were one of the most important aspects of their experience of digital storytelling.

An exemplar of a digital story by an elderly Welshman, Ieuan Sheen, recalling his school days was produced by the Capture Wales project in 2003 and is still being recycled on the BBC website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/ capturewales/background/ieuan-sheen.shtml). What is remarkable about this example is the repurposing of the still photograph using digital techniques. Rather than a fleeting glimpse, as the story’s title ‘Flashback’ implies, we are required to linger and re-look many times at only three photographs which are used in a story that lasts two minutes fifty seconds. The first is a colour photograph of Beddwellty school in the present day, carefully taken by the producers of the project in order to allow a cross dissolve to the second black and white photograph of the same school seventy years previously, from the participant’s own collection. The third photograph in black and white, also belonging to the narrator, is a school photograph of his teacher surrounded by thirteen children. It is the extensive repurposing of this one image that is the most salient feature of the digital story. This institutional image is cropped sixteen times, only shown in its entirety once, as the narrative focuses on each child personally, with the longest duration applied to a cropped out image of the proud, smiling teacher. The viewer/listener is searching for the young boy’s face that matches the nostalgic narrative voice. This voice harmonises perfectly with the mythology of Wales as a community-based, rural and oral culture. Finally, the viewer is rewarded with the shy boy who, as the narrative reminisces, is playing the prince in a pantomime. As the “prince stood frozen” so, too, does the image; the boy’s face is cropped, with the zoom function slowly allowing the viewer a closer inspection.

Clearly, the usability of simple digital tools such as image pan filter in software like Premiere allows participants to apply cinematic functions to still photographs and for viewers to extend their time over an image. Furthermore, this story’s simple use of the sound effect of a school bell ringing proves that extensive or sophisticated background audio is unnecessary and perhaps distracting. It is this new use of digital media, pairing down production and consumption to the absolute basics, that so resolutely opposes the “bells and whistles” approach to digital technologies that audiences have become accustomed to. This unsophisticated method even extends to the fact that this gentleman recorded the narrative in a public toilet as this was the quietest location at the time.

While demonstrating that an elderly gentleman with no prior knowledge of computers can easily, within a day or so, produce a beautifully crafted piece of digital media, the digital story also draws attention to two other key competencies. First, the story demonstrates a theoretical understanding of visual schema when looking at old photographs. The close-ups of what Roland Barthes would call the punctums, those “sensitive points” that punctuate the photographic image, show that the participant (with the assistance of a professional with editing experience) was able to identify how these photographs should be read.11 Therefore, this active audience member not only creatively produced digital content but used the software’s tools to embed a structure of viewing that speaks to memorymaking. This requires the viewer to linger and focus upon key details, such as the clasped hands of one small child, just as the owner of the beloved image would. Second, the participant’s re-structuring of the photographic with the use of cinematic techniques of digital software challenges a dominant reading of digital media and memory as somehow in tension. The digital technologies are used to promote narrative realism, a stable self-identity, a solidified memory, psychic continuity, and a coherent life-story. Celia Lury has argued in her exposition of how media, technology and memory impact upon identity that “the transformations wrought by images, especially the mechanically reproduced image of the photograph, in the role of memory in prosthetic (auto)biographies simultaneously disturbs and reorders the conventional narratives of continuity of consciousness and self-identity.”12 This is clearly not the case with this digital story’s experimentation with “prosthetic memory.” Phenomenology’s cube makes one more turn. The repurposed photographic image, the inclusion of one sound effect, the simply produced narrative, and the distinctive narrative voice make one man’s memory visible and the technologies that enabled this digital memory story slide out of view. As those who work on the BBC’s digital storytelling projects continually reiterate, making digital stories is paradoxically not about the technology.

Footnotes:

1. Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1998) 150.
2. BBC “About Capture Wales; Capture Wales: Digital Storytelling,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/capturewales/. (20th July 2006).
3. Jay Lambert, Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community (Berkeley, CA: Digital Diner Press, 2002).
4. Daniel Meadows, “Digital Storytelling: Research-Based Practice in New Media,” Visual Communication 2 (2003): 189-193.
5. Jenny Kidd, “Capture Wales: Digital Storytelling with the BBC,” Wales Media Journal 2 (2005), http://www.cyfrwng. com/e/journal accessed/. (1st July 2006).
6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Vintage Books, 1995); The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (London: Vintage Books, 1990); Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Vintage Books, 1988).
7. Colin McArthur, Television and History (London: BFI, 1980). 56.
8. Daniel C. Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 131.
9. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995). 7.
10. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995). 5.
11. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage Books, 1993). 26-27.
12. Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity (London: Routledge, 1998). 100.

Bibliography:

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage Books, 1993.
BBC. “About Capture Wales; Capture Wales: Digital Storytelling.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/capturewales/ (20th July 2006).
Cubitt, Sean. Digital Aesthetics. London: Sage, 1998.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Vintage Books, 1995.
Ibid. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. London: Vintage Books, 1990.
Ibid. Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. London: Vintage Books, 1988.
Hallin, Daniel C. The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London: Routledge, 1995.
Kidd, Jenny. “Capture Wales: Digital Storytelling with the BBC.” Wales Media Journal 2 (2005), http://www.cyfrwng.com/e/journal (July 1st 2006).
Lambert, Jay. Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. Berkeley, CA: Digital Diner Press, 2002.
Lury, Celia. Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity. London: Routledge, 1998.
McArthur, Colin. Television and History. London: BFI, 1980.
Meadows, Daniel. “Digital Storytelling: Research-Based Practice in New Media.” Visual Communication 2 (2003): 189-193.

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Simon Turner, Senior Lecturer in Radio Production, University of Gloucestershire, UK, who provided insights into the production processes of digital storytelling. Simon is a member of the production team for BBC Capture Wales.