At last an edited collection of articles about different aspects of digital storytelling has arrived at Amazon US and on the publisher’s site, Peter Lang (it will doubtless be available at Amazon UK soon).

Table of contents follows:
Knut Lundby: Introduction: Digital storytelling, mediatized stories
Ola Erstad/James V. Wertsch: Tales of mediation: Narrative and digital media as cultural tools
Nick Couldry: Digital storytelling, media research and democracy: Conceptual choices and alternative futures
Kirsten Drotner: Boundaries and bridges: Digital storytelling in education studies and media studies
Nancy Thumim: ‘It’s good for them to know my story’: Cultural mediation as tension
Birgit Hertzberg Kaare/Knut Lundby: Mediatized lives: Autobiography and assumed authenticity in digital storytelling
Mark Evan Nelson/Glynda A. Hull: Self-presentation through multimedia: A Bakhtinian perspective on digital storytelling
Kelly McWilliam: Digital storytelling as a ‘discursively ordered domain’
Lotte Nyboe/Kirsten Drotner: Identity, aesthetics, and digital narration
Larry Friedlander: Narrative strategies in a digital age: Authorship and authority
John Hartley: Problems of expertise and scalability in self-made media
Ola Erstad/Kenneth Silseth: Agency in digital storytelling: Challenging the educational context
Elisabeth Staksrud: Fairytale parenting: Contextual factors influencing children’s online self-representation
David Gauntlett: Creative brainwork: Building metaphors of identity for social science research
Tone Bratteteig: Does it matter that it is digital?
David Brake: Shaping the ‘me’ in MySpace: The framing of profiles on a social network site.

Comments on the book would be welcome - particularly on the last chapter mentioned which is my own!

You can find an assortment of papers delivered at Media, Communication and Humanity linked here (ordered by subject).

NowPublic, a website all about encouraging members of the public to act as “citizen journalists” has some terrible processes in place. I had a picture that one of their members wanted to use. They sent me an email via flickr which didn’t give me a return address and that sent me to a link which would allow me to indicate that I was happy to share my picture. In order to do this though, I would be obliged to join their site and fill in a membership form. Not only that, but to be a member I would have to “Agree to the Terms of Service and receive e-mails from NowPublic.”

I was happy to let my picture be used and indeed to encourage a new site, but not at the cost of receiving an unspecified amount of additional email from a site - and for all I know from third parties as well - I couldn’t even find a reference to whether or not I might get such mails in the terms of service or privacy policy!

One of the questions that fascinates me is the relationship between Internet technologies and social norms - particularly those around privacy. Some suggest that as “Digital Natives” get older, their exposure to various tools for online self-disclosure may change their view of privacy norms. In today’s New York Times*, however, we see that this process is not always just an unintended consequence of technological change - it seems that the founder of Facebook wants his software to change people’s privacy norms:

When I spoke to him, Zuckerberg argued that News Feed is central to Facebook’s success. “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

Of course this makes sense commercially - the more happy we are to share information about ourselves with others, the more data about ourselves we provide for potential advertisers and the more we provide the content that brings people back to Facebook. But there are some un-addressed problems here.

Even if we get comfortable with this new attitude to self-disclosure is this a good thing for society? And what about the transitional difficulties when self-disclosing young people run into authorities who don’t understand or sympathise with this new attitude?

(Also see my earlier post “The Death of Privacy” or indeed any of the posts here categorised Privacy)

* I’ve highlighted just a small part of this article by Clive Thompson - it’s well worth reading the rest too if you want a quick and interesting overview of the issues around microblogging…

I was looking through my notes on Bourdieu just now and came across this beauty of a sentence from Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction : a social critique of the judgement of taste. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. p. 172:

As a system of practice-generating schemes which expresses systematically the necessity and freedom inherent in its class condition and the difference constituting that position, the habitus apprehends differences between conditions, which it grasps in the form of differences between classified, classifying practices (products of other habitus), in accordance with principles of differentiation which, being themselves the product of these differences, are objectively attuned to them and therefore tend to perceive them as natural.

Might it have been clearer in the original French? Thankfully Goffman who has replaced Bourdieu as one of the central theorists in my thesis is insightful while remaining one of the more readable sociologists…