The Self and the Institution

Media researchers have not been much preoccupied with a genre named Digital Storytelling. Since its origin in the early 90s, it has spread from California to the rest of the United States and has been evolving for several years now as a media practice around the globe. I therefore want to draw more attention to digital storytelling, here understood as a specific genre developed at the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) in California and defined as a short, first-person video narrative that combines voice recordings, still and moving images, and music or other sounds (www.storycenter.org). Such storytelling is regarded as both a movement and a method; and it is in its idea a short personal story, about the self. In the subtitle of his book Digital Storytelling, the leader of the center, Joe Lambert, highlights that this type of narratives are Creating Community through Capturing Lives of individuals (Lambert 2009). This genre is embedded in a democratic and empowering ideology. Along these lines, the main concern of this article is to discuss whether a change can be observed in the digital storytelling genre from an individualistic perspective to a more collective perspective - a shift from narrating selves to narrating communities. In examining this question, this work draws upon 45 films produced by bachelor students at the University of Oslo in 2010 and 2011.