A Partial Promise of Voice: Digital Storytelling and the Limits of Listening

The continual rise of participatory media offers increasing opportunities for nonprofessionals and marginalised communities to tell their stories. In the policy arena, Australia's Social Inclusion Agenda and international debates on indicators of well-being name ‘voice’ as a key capability for social inclusion and individual flourishing. In this article, I engage recent scholarship on ‘listening’ and ‘voice that matters’ to highlight the limits of the participatory media genre of digital storytelling and of the social inclusion category of ‘voice’. The discussion is illustrated via examples from public launch events for ‘mini-films’ produced in digital storytelling projects facilitated by Information Cultural Exchange (ICE), a new media arts organisation working in Sydney's cosmopolitan western suburbs. While these public events ensure a process of ‘voice’, I argue for a greater commitment to political listening in media research, practice and policy, lest the promise of ‘voice’ remain only partially fulfilled.

[1]  J. Salazar.  Digital stories and emerging citizens' media practices by migrant youth in Western Sydney , 2010 .

[2]  Tanja Dreher.  Eavesdropping with permission: the politics of listening for safer speaking spaces , 2009 .

[3]  Jo A. Tacchi,et al.  Finding a Voice , 2009 .

[4]  Joe Lambert.  Where it all Started , 2009 .

[5]  Nick Couldry,et al.  Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling , 2008, New Media Soc..

[6]  N. Couldry.  Rethinking the politics of voice , 2009 .

[7]  Tanja Dreher.  Speaking up or being heard? Community media interventions and the politics of listening , 2010 .

[8]  John Hartley,et al.  Computational power meets human contact , 2009 .

[9]  R. Lister.  From equality to social inclusion: New Labour and the welfare state , 1998 .

[10]  Jean Burgess,et al.  Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling , 2006 .

[11]  Cate Thill.  Courageous listening, responsibility for the other and the Northern Territory Intervention , 2009 .

[12]  J. Stiglitz,et al.  Report by the commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress , 2011 .

[13]  Jo A. Tacchi,et al.  Finding a voice : digital storytelling as participatory development in Southeast Asia , 2009 .

[14]  Jim Macnamara,et al.  E-Electioneering: Use of new media in the 2007 Australian federal election , 2008 .

[15]  Tanja Dreher,et al.  Listening, pathbuilding and continuations: A research agenda for the analysis of listening , 2009 .

[16]  Tanja Dreher.  Listening across difference: Media and multiculturalism beyond the politics of voice , 2009 .

[17]  N. Couldry.  Why Voice Matters: Culture And Politics After Neoliberalism , 2010 .

[18]  Jenny Kidd,et al.  Capture Wales: the BBC Digital Storytelling Project , 2009 .

[19]  Margaret Anne Clarke.  Developing digital storytelling in Brazil , 2009 .