8buzzDigital storytelling is the practice of combining narrative with digital content, including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component. Sophisticated digital stories can be interactive movies that include highly produced audio and visual effects, while basic digital story can just consist of a set of slides with corresponding narration or music.

In fact, digital storytelling can be looked at as the modern extension of the ancient art of storytelling, now just interwoven with digitized still and moving images and sound.

Thanks to new media and digital technologies, individuals can approach storytelling from unique perspectives. For instance, many people use elaborate non-traditional story forms, such as non-linear and interactive narratives. However, the most important characteristics of a digital story are that it is capable of combining still and moving imagery, sound and text, as well as being nonlinear and contain interactive features, compared to the traditional conventions of storytelling, enhancing that way the experience for both the author and audience and allowing for greater interactivity.

With the arrival of new media devices like computers, digital cameras, recorders and software, individuals may share their digital stories via the Internet, on discs, podcasts or other electronic media, especially since digital tools and software, such as e.g. iMovie and Movie Maker, make it easy and convenient to create them.

Digital storytelling has gotten a lot of attention and has been implemented in business by marketing which used it as a tool for getting user-generated content, e.g. when consumers contribute their opinion based on their own experiences about a product to promote a firm's product in the digital world. Digital storytelling is being used as well by innovative startups to pitch their ideas to the potential investors and to communicate with potential customers to get feedback about the market potential of their product or service.

In any case, digital stories can be instructional, persuasive, historical or reflective, and the resources available to incorporate into a digital story are virtually limitless, giving the storyteller enormous creative latitude. It can be effectively applied to nearly any subject, since constructing a narrative and communicating it effectively just requires the storyteller to think carefully about the topic and consider the audience’s perspective.

 

By MediaBUZZ