Editors' Note

Abstract

Sobol and Senehi Editors’ Note Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2020), pp. 149–152. Copyright © 2021 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 Editors’ Note Joseph Sobol and Jessica Senehi A t the outset of Storytelling, Self, Society, the editors set a course that reflected a certain prevailing understanding of the storytelling field around the turn of the millennium. Storytelling was at its core a live, unmediated transmission of story between designated tellers and sets of listening partners. Articles in the journal would be curated to place this primary act of narrative communication at the hub of a wheel of contemporary mediations and purposes, but unless we could manage, even after heavy squinting, to discern in a piece some chain of begats tracing back to the narrative Adam of orality, we would bar the door. This position was compensatory, perhaps, for revival storytellers’ own persistent sense of dispossession. Because oral storytelling had been silted under by centuries of technological strata, leaving it obscured in a cultural landscape full of shiny new narrative forms, we wanted the journal to display only the clearest and cleanest of our efforts to excavate and polish the lost inheritance. Applied storytelling work, with its artistic aims sublimated to a variety of social or institutional objectives—this would be the journal’s bread and butter, expressing the vernacular vigor of the art in a range of utilitarian settings. But storytelling as a traditional and contemporary performance art was to be set at the head of the feasting table. Even as this disciplinary model was being constructed, the cultural ground was shifting underfoot. In an article for this journal in 2010, one of the coeditors wrote, “Our decades of storytelling revivalism have seen the rise of the personal computer, that summary aggregation of all previous electronic mediating 150 n Editors’ Note functions into one exponentially powerful and pervasive cultural presence” (Sobol). As media prophet Marshall MacLuhan had foretold, this transformation in the technological environment begat an expansion or more properly an explosion of the cultural frame through which storytelling would be practiced and understood. Among the first to formalize the conjunction of storytelling and digital technologies were Dana Atchley and Joe Lambert of the California-based Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS). Atchley was a filmmaker, photographer, graphic artist , performance artist, and new-media savant as well as a storyteller fascinated by the emotional resonances of personal narratives and family artifacts. His experiments with the intersections of live and prerecorded storytelling pieces in digital media frames became a touchstone of a new format, crystallized in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the programs of the CDS. Lambert, who had run a local theater company in San Francisco focused on community oral histories, helped Atchley to transmute his long-form solo pieces into an easily transferable template for creating three- to five-minute “digital stories.” These would be developed in community workshop settings, using inexpensive portable technologies to mix recorded narration, visual montage, and evocative musical soundscapes. The techniques blended the appeal of family scrapbooking, the allure of new media, and emotionally accessible, populist aesthetics. This first iteration of the digital storytelling concept was one of several cultural developments around the turn of the millennium that reframed and complicated the contemporary storytelling movement. Others included the insurgent personal storytelling events embodied in The Moth mainstages and story slams and the spread of popular oral histories on radio, podcast, and social media. A defining thread to these developments is the tightly recursive layering of individual storytellers’ time-stamped voices in fractal webs of digital preservation , replication, and distribution. The 2010 article by Sobol continued: Digital media provide a democratic cultural matrix in ways that its predecessor media could not and never attempted to match. Armed only with cheap digital audio and video recording devices attached to their PCs, an international brotherhood and sisterhood of isolated geek youth can chat, hook up, clown around, make art, and broadcast their self-instructed self-expressions to potential audiences of millions around the globe, completely bypassing the Sobol and Senehi n 151 gatekeepers that have traditionally rationed out the products of prior cultural systems. (p. 75) In the decade since...