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44] Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education
All this means that multimedia content is appearing on social media at a
massive rate every second. The Web 2.0 environment is full of stories, with
unlimited accessibility and no barriers to sharing them. Micronarratives have
emerged to meet the needs of users who are always online, experiencing a
constant flood of information and who are therefore only able to absorb short
pieces of content. The social media content stream is dominated by these
short pieces of content, which are easy to create, share and consume - from
Twitter posts of up to 280 characters to Instagram’ storytelling categorized by
images and hashtags, to the use of gifs. The gif is a micro-narrative between
a still image and a video with minimal expansion, expressing mood and
entertainment. In the new micro-narrative storytelling world of social media,
images, memes, micro-texts, and micro-videos dominate, contrasting with
the larger, traditional written content of blogs, news portals, and podcasts.
Since the 2010s, the social media platforms have been proliferating that
have primarily been based on the serial nature of video and image sharing.
Content producers (i.e. professional influencers) aim to build up a massive
following on video-sharing platforms and social media influencing their
followers with their views and appearance. These micro-content producers
target their followers by advertising products, and the sponsorship they receive
for their advertising depends on their number of followers.
However, amateur users of internet applications and platforms are not only
individual content producers; Web 2.0 platforms also enable collaborative
storytelling, most obviously through the Internet’s largest collaborative
encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and through applications that create a shared visual
and multimedia narrative (such as Google’s applications). Alexander (2011)
also finds image-sharing sites suitable for collaborative storytelling in Web
2.0, citing Flickr’s Tell a Story in 5 Frames (Visual storytelling) project as an
example, in which users told a whole story without words using five images.®
In summary, the digital narratives of the first decades of the 21“ century
are determined by media convergence, hypertextuality, and are characterized
by conciseness, interactivity, and participation. Forms of expression through
traditional and new media have a combined impact on the stories that are
made public through digitalization, as the type of media can vary according
to the type of message. At the same time, the hypertextuality of the Internet
breaks the conventions of linear storytelling and creates branching, networked
structures in the narratives of the 21‘ century. As people who use smart
devices for navigation and entertainment encounter information in large and
unlimited quantities, effective messaging must be delivered in compressed
form. In the new millennium, we are no longer talking about recipients ¬
audiences, viewers, listeners or readers — but about users who interactively
participate in the creation of narrative.
§ https://www.flickr.com/groups/visualstory/