I was intrigued by the first chapter of Joe Lambert’s book, Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. In chapter 3, Lambert tells his own story of how he, along with several other key contributors, founded the Center for Digital Storytelling. His journey began in 1950s Dallas, where he grew up in, as he put it, a “small oasis of liberal friendliness in the desert of 1950s Texas conservatism” (p.26). I was intrigued about how folk music of that era played a major role in shaping Lambert’s idea of storytelling. He comments “digital storytelling is rooted fundamentally in the notion of democratized culture that was the hallmark of the folk music, reclaimed folk culture, and cultural activist traditions of the 1960s” (p.26).
Coincidentally, my mother has had a life-long interest in folk music since her days as a student at Iowa State University in the early 1960s. On many a long drive to my grandparents’s house in Iowa, we would hear Peter Paul & Mary, Joan Baez and The Kingston Trio. Although I’ve never been a huge fan of the genre, I understand why young people connect with those songs as well as with the songwriters of that time period. Much of the folk music inspired college students during the protest movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For Lambert, the folk music gave him ideas on how individuals, especially those marginalized by factors such as income, race and ethnicity, could tell their stories. As Lambert puts it, “… the populist artist in the folk traditions sought out a way to celebrate the ordinary, the common person, and their daily battles to survive and overcome” (p.27).
In discussing the significance of folk music, Lambert brings up the idea of “citizen-centered authorship and authority” (p.27). He further expands on the significance of this concept when discussing how, in 1993, he and his future Center for Digital Storytelling collaborators “came to understand that mixing digital photography and non-linear editing were tremendous play spaces for people” (p.32). To me, the 20th century concept of “citizen-centered authorship” sounds very much like what we have now in the 21st century internet with WordPress blogs and YouTube videos. These are forms of personal expression that are not subject to centralized editorial control. As someone who went to college in the early 1990s and studied television production, our generation were just beginning to understand the possibilities of using video for storytelling purposes. Unfortunately at that time, my educational institution, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, only had Panasonic camcorders and simple linear editing systems for us to put together our personal narratives, which were largely inspired by indie filmmakers of fiction such as Richard Linklater, Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino. I never thought I would drift off more towards the documentary genre later in my career.
One thing missing from this chapter was information on where Lambert went to college. That might seem like a small omission to some, but I was curious as to what type of institution helped steer Lambert in his thinking. He mentions coming to San Fransisco in 1976, but everything between his arrival there and his childhood in Dallas seems to be a mystery. Personally, I found my time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to be incredibly rewarding, despite learning with out-of-date video technology. Overall, it was a very enlightening chapter that gave me a glimpse into the author’s journey. I am already delving into the next chapter.
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