A GENRE THEORY PERSPECTIVE ON DIGITAL ... - ETD

activities and structures. Also, I suggest that we attend to multiple historical trajectories that
provide the reproductive basis and resources for the present discursive work. In this direction, an
ongoing digital storytelling involves the unfolding and weaving together of a diversity of homely
as well as sophisticated genres. These “other” cultural practices and meaning potentials residing
in “other” places and times are what extant research fails to account for. When we take these
historically accumulated meaning potential into consideration, we may come to observe each
unique digital storytelling project as partially familiar.
In what follows, I further my interrogation of a celebratory stance by elaborating on these
ideas from a sociohistorical perspective. In doing so, I draw on analytical frames found in genre
theory to explore the production condition of digital storytelling as socio-historically situated,
mediated by cultural tools, horizontally and vertically distributed, and injected with meanings
residing in other times and places. Working from analytical frames that I have come to name as
that of a social historian, I conceive digital storytelling as a loosely defined cultural model that
has acquired historically developed and stabilized discursive, material, and practical structures,
which constantly mediate ongoing discursive work in paradoxical ways. In this vein, what is
achievable by an individual is always considered within the framework of a broad, collective
cultural practice.
In fundamental ways, the social historian’s view diverges from the celebratory stance in
its effort to grapple with contingent, local, and individual discursive acts within the historically
inherited, typified, and collective frameworks, experiences, and structures. In revising the model
of discursive production, a social historian does not take value from the individual and his/her
contingent activities. Rather, a social historian temporarily foregrounds the historical, collective,
and typified to reveal a host of shaded forces, agents, practices, and institutions that work in
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