Digital storytelling is a putting into practice of new media literacy, no matter how you approach it.  As Hull and Nelson describe their work with Japanese students in “Self-presentation through multimedia: a Bahktinian perspective on digital storytelling,” we see a creative struggle between the need to signify unique experience and the need to ensure an audience’s response.  This isn’t particular to working with visual media, as it reminds me of writing poetry.  As a poet, I often felt the need to hone an image that would be so personally iconic that it would not likely be repeated elsewhere!  It’s not very realistic, but that was part of the impulse to write poetry, I think, for me–although patterning ourselves after famous poet’s work and taking them as models was habitual–was this idea that we could be a unique semiotic brand.  The goal was not to write in a vacuum, but to active seek and find audiences that would recognize that brand and affirm its worth.

I see these impulses at work in Ying’s digital story.  His story of his move to the US and stunning success in academics and the arts  is unusual by the standards of many people his age, but the narratives stresses the ordinariness of a stable and happy family and friendships.  The story fights to make him seem like everyone else, while many student’s digital stories strive to show their “unique brand,” what makes them different and special.  The images of babies show the universal nature of emotions and that he has them.  Such images evoke a connection with the storyteller through the simplicity and innocence of one-year-olds having emotional reactions of pleasure or distress.  The best digital stories i have seen are very aware of the need to provide stimuli that evokes emotional connection to the story, often at the expense of exceptionalism.

Postscript: Looking ahead to next week’s reading, on seeing Ying’s story, I am also reminded of John Dewey’s words quoted in Bonnie Nardi’s My Life as a Night Elf Priest:

 Dewey formulated aesthetic experience as participatory engagement in activity that is organized in distinctive stages and in which a satisfying completion is the end point of actions which are themselves pleasurable. To invoke concepts such as “pleasure” or “satisfaction” is to invoke an active subject for whom pleasure and satisfaction are products of a particular personal history rather than inherent characteristics of a set of actions. Aesthetic experience for Dewey required collective expression; it connects us to others in relations of community and “common life.”

So Ying’s story sets out the telling about this aesthetic experience, which is more than the events or the accomplishments that were achieved.  It is also the story of how the experiences connected him “to others in relations of community and ‘common life’.”  (Nardi invokes Dewey’s words while describing aesthetic experience through the playing of a MMORPG.)