Clodagh Miskelly the spoke about the pros and cons of digital stories as a communication approach.
Clodagh is a UK based freelance digital story facilitator who has been working with digital stories for ten years. She has covered a range of issues from healthcare to famine thorough the use of advocacy, community activism and communication skills.
For Clodagh, the positive aspects of digital storytelling include:
- An ability to combine photography (including people’s own personal albums) and images that have been created for the stories (both illustrative and metaphorical) to convey the wealth of individual experience
- Allowing people to make their own judgments and learn from the process
- The ease with which they can be based around a simple hook (for example, a photo or dramatic question)
- Illustrating the power of the voice itself – it is a personal story told in someone’s own words. Their voice, accent, emotion and pace all convey the experience
- The medium’s strength as an advocacy tool
- The chance to use anecdotal material – they tell a simple story which makes them memorable
- Their success in reaching out to people on a human level
Codagh then went on to explain some of the challenges of digital storytelling:
- The format can be imposed unnecessarily – sometimes people decide that they are going to create a digital story regardless of whether this is the best option
- People sometimes mimic forms of other successful storytellers and feel the story has to be done in a certain way that has worked for other people
- Sometimes people feel they have to tell the story people want to hear
- People can make great stories, put them on the website “and then what…..?”
