What is it about?
Since 2008, the multi-year and multi-platform Big Stories, Small Towns documentary project (bigstories.com.au) has facilitated the telling, recording, archiving and dissemination of auto/ biographical narratives in Australia, Cambodia, West Papua, Malaysia and Indonesia. Through this work, a critical juncture has been identified in the mediascape where reconstruction can materialise.
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Why is it important?
While a level of interconnectivity has always underpinned storytelling within communities, shifting global dynamics and new mediums allow for an alternative examination of multi-layered communities and the complex relations between people, social backgrounds, technology/media and place. I argue that this represents a fundamental shift away from a centralised vision of storymaking (i.e. author/documenter-centric) to a collectivised storytelling practice. Thus, this article moves attention from the rhetoric of texts to practices of community organisation and the technological and embodied material relations, which aspire to produce a collectively enacted sense of place and identity.
Perspectives
For roughly 20 years, I have been making media. When I started it was the dawning of an Internet society – our own digital Age of Aquarius and a much-heralded digital media revolution. In my transmedia documentary project Big Stories, Small Towns I have had the opportunity to create a platform and a system that embodies the following two assumptions: 1. Humans cast their identity in some narrative form in all cultures, and so storytelling is at the core of describing both individual and collective experience. 2. Participatory media have the potential to create a more nuanced, ethical, diverse and democratic media culture.
Dr Martin Potter
Deakin University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Critical junctures: place-based storytelling in the Big Stories, Small Towns participatory documentary project, Media International Australia, March 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1329878x17694754.
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