1 The Story Economy: Digital Storytelling in Economic and Community Development

Abstract: It is difficult to underestimate the importance of storytelling. In every community, local or global, physical or virtual, it is one of the fundamental building blocks of meaning. From an outsider’s perspective, it may sometimes seem as if members of low-wealth, repressed, exploited, and underdeveloped communities have little besides the social connections and events that make up their own stories. In the context of a proliferating global information economy, however, we find that the story gains a renewed place of power. Today, the digital story is a storable, retrievable and value-creating knowledge asset, a personal icon and a source of qualitative data, a currency for social capital. The authors argue that these disenfranchised communities, often relegated to an underserved economic status in industrial society, may in fact be able to leverage their unique knowledge assets for participation in the mainstream, digitally interconnected, post-industrial economy, through a bottom-up approach to economic development. Digital storytelling allows a community to learn and practice valuable media production skills that in turn provide greater economic mobility and social visibility. Digital storytelling simultaneously offers a potential solution to problems created by technology dissemination initiatives like One Laptop Per Child. Such initiatives may focus on hardware distribution to the exclusion of culturally sensitive integration. Hardware and software can instead be incorporated into existing social structures and articulated through community values when community members use media production technologies to tell their stories, thereby introducing new technologies, developing marketable skills, and dealing with real and local issues