TWM | DIGITAL STORYTELLING MOVEMENT

What is the Community Digital Storytelling Movement?
Why Story?
What goes on in a typical Community Digital Storytelling Workshop?

In this age of increasing media monopolies, global media markets, and convergent media, mainstream media has struggled with its traditional methods of gathering news from diverse perspectives. Even those within the industry recognize that mainstream media's trickle-down approach to storytelling poses important concerns about the legitimacy of the information, and compromises the notion of open, accessible, and balanced information.

This traditional approach has sharply contrasted with the rise of the community digital storytelling movement, a grassroots media phenomenon in which communities are creating their own short, three- to five- minute digital stories from the found material in their lives (digital video, photographs, letters, news clippings, etc). The principles of community digital storytelling movement draws from a diverse body of work including: third cinema, popular education, creative writing, oral history, filmmaking, and digital media manipulation. The basis of TWM's community digital storytelling curriculum came from work that was developed at the Berkeley based Center for Digital Storytelling.

Though community digital stories are not professional productions, what community digital stories offer in terms of intimacy and authenticity are invaluable in providing multiple community perspectives on important life issues as well as providing an important and powerful forum for communities to tell their own truths in their own voices.