Richard MacDonald

Digital platforms and narrative exchange: Hidden constraints, emerging agency

It is well known that narrative exchange takes distinctive forms in the digital age. Less understood are the digitally based processes and infrastructures that support or constrain the wider exchange of narrative materials. This article reports on research in a UK sixth form college with ambitions to expand its students’ digital skills. Our approach was to identify the preconditions (sometimes, but often not, involving fully formed narrative agency) that might support sustained narrative exchange. We call these conditions collectively ‘proto-agency’, and explore them as a way of establishing what a ‘digital story circle’ (not just a digital story) might be: that is, how new digital platforms and resources contribute to the infrastructures for narrative exchange and wider empowerment in a complex institutional context. During our fieldwork, interesting insights into the tensions around social media emerged. Only by understanding such forms of proto-agency can we begin to assess the participatory potential of digital platforms for young people in education today.

Constructing a digital storycircle: digital infrastructure and mutual recognition

Building on the principles of the digital storytelling movement, this article asks whether the narrative exchange within the ‘storycircles’ of storymakers created in face-to-face workshops can be further replicated by drawing on digital infrastructure in specific ways. It addresses this question by reporting on the successes and limitations of a five-stream project of funded action research with partners in north-west England that explored the contribution of digital infrastructure to processes of narrative exchange and the wider processes of mutual recognition that flow from narrative exchange. Three main dimensions of a digital storycircle are explored: multiplications, spatializations (or the building of narratives around sets of individual narratives), and habits of mutual recognition. Limitations relate to the factors of time, and levels of digital development and basic digital access.

“Going Back in a Heartbeat”: Collective memory and the online circulation of family photographs

This article focuses on a form of online photo-sharing practice largely overlooked in recent literature: the sharing of personal collections of “old” analogue photographs retrieved from family albums, suitcases and cupboards. Recent scholarship on digital photography and online photo-sharing has argued that the widespread adoption of digital technologies and network infrastructures for image capture, storage, transmission and display have led to an “ontological reorientation” of popular photography away from preservation and memory. The article discusses two Facebook groups devoted to sharing photos and memories relating to Salford in North West England. The fate of Salford’s postwar working class neighbourhoods, vanguard spaces of creative destruction, and the relative scarcity of personal photographs of vanished streets are discussed as context for understanding photo-sharing as a popular collective memory practice.