The global diffusion of a community media practice: digital storytelling online

Since its emergence in the early to mid 1990s, digital storytelling has been taken up around the world. It is now widely used across North America, Europe, and Australasia, but is significantly less visible in Africa, Asia, and South America. It is, thus, most popular in the Western industrialized world, which is perhaps unsurprising given the West's dominance over key mass-market technologies, from home computing processors to platform software. Nevertheless, there are already clear patterns in the global application of digital storytelling. This chapter provides an overview of those trends by charting the online presence of digital storytelling, based on a survey of 300 programs operating around the world. This chapter, the first to offer such an evidence-based trend analysis of the practice, details the overarching trends in global, organisation-based digital storytelling