After the basic necessities of life, as one English author wrote, stories are what people most need.
It is no surprise that many hours out of each day are spent consuming stories, be it directly from a friend, from the news and social media or television programs, movies or favourite sports team.
Stories connect us to the past and help form an understanding of ourselves and communities. They highlight our struggles, successes and often our failures, but all the while they communicate what is important to us and what we ought to strive toward.
As Ilona Beiks, Powell River’s literacy outreach coordinator, points out in her piece about seniors’ digital storytelling, while the technology and way we tell stories has changed over the millennia, from cave paintings and hieroglyphics to tales around a campfire and movies playing on screens large and small, storytelling perseveres, even flourishes.
Everyone has a story to tell.
We live in an information age and the tools for enhancing storytelling have become easier to use and more accessible, particularly for students and seniors.
Creating digital stories is the practice of combining narrative with digital content, images, sound and video, to create a short movie, usually with a strong emotional thread. They can be highly produced and be interactive like a webpage or they can be as simple as a slideshow with audio, it all depends on the storyteller and the choices they make. The storyteller has enormous creative latitude to what he or she will include.
Some leaning theorists hold that as a teaching technique, storytelling can be applied to almost any subject. Storytellers only need to think carefully about their topic and consider their audience.
Digital stories usually start with a written script. Anyone interested in learning to write memoirs will find those workshops fairly easily through Powell River Public Library or Vancouver Island University’s continuing education department. Technology, while not necessarily improving stories, has made it easier for wider distribution for those who use social media or depend on smartphones to keep them organized and connected. The amount of video content being uploaded to Youtube each day is staggering. The stories we tell have not changed, but the way we tell them and the number of people who hear them have as the Internet continues to change how we connect with each other.
