UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

In the category of vernacular or user generated digital storytelling it seems viable to distinguish
two DS types: in terms of approach to content organisation, presentation and its management.
First, vlogging usually features a person in front of a video camera narrating/recounting her
quotidian experiences, preferences, giving advice, lectures in foreign languages... Vlogging thus
creates a record of a person‘s activity both in terms of narrated content and in the ‗history‘ of
posts. Social networking functionalities enable sharing such content among friends and absolute
strangers alike. Moreover, given the functionality of both audiovisual and textual commenting,
such multimodal digital externalisations of intimacy/personality/identity are subject to scrutiny
and (dis)interest and (dis)like by other users who may add to the creation of a 4MO by liking,
grading, commenting on the posted material. This may facilitate a very loose, on-the-fly
community of quite possibly unfamiliar users, who may (or not) nevertheless get to meet another
user via, first, participating in the co-creation of a person‘s digital storytelling, and second via
taking this initial encounter further. The co-creation at work here is in that any action related to a
posted video (as a 4MO thus including search bar, description, tags, comments, likes, etc.) 225
contributes to it expansion in terms of content and meaning. Such video thus becomes a public site
for externalisation (and indeed management) of intimacy about a particular topic. Moreover, and
in addition to its archival component, YouTube gives space for externalisation also of very
personal memories which the video maker decided to ―be exposed before [her] peers.‖ 226 This
approach engages both the maker and the user into a very direct relationship (the person is usually
facing the camera), where the potential addressee/participating user becomes the co-creator and
the judge.
The second UGC DS type in YouTube is audiovisual material that fits more directly into Joe
Lambert‘s definition of digital storytelling (see Chapter 1) and uses audiovisuals to narrate a
several-minute piece informed by one‘s personal experience. In Lambert‘s conceptualisation of
digital storytelling this practice entails a ―short, first person video-narrative created by combining
recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds.‖ 227 In most cases digital
stories thus conceptualised are life stories, as several authors discuss in Knut Lundby‘s Digital
Storytelling. 228 In DS as memory practice individuals embark on a journey of audiovisual
(self)discovery and create digital stories of pictures, moving images, music and occasionally
225 See Frank Kessler and Mirko Tobias Schäfer, ―Navigating YouTube: Constituting a Hybrid Information
Management System,‖ in Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader, 275–291, 279.
226 As the Judge in Pink Floyd‘s The Wall shouts it in the concluding The Trial,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCMHmDnfD6I, accessed 23 August 2011.
227 http://www.storycenter.org/index1.html, accessed 23 August 2011.
228 Knut Lundby, Digital Storytelling.
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