Recent years have seen amateur personal stories, focusing on «me», flourish on social networking sites and in digital storytelling workshops. The resulting digital stories could be called «mediatized stories». This book deals with these self-representational stories, aiming to understand the transformations in the age-old practice of storytelling that have become possible with the new, digital media. Its approach is interdisciplinary, exploring how the mediation or mediatization processes of digital storytelling can be grasped and offering a sociological perspective of media studies and a socio-cultural take of the educational sciences. Aesthetic and literary perspectives on narration as well as questioning from an informatics perspective are also included.

The Editor: Knut Lundby is Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo, Norway. He holds a Dr.philos. in sociology from the University of Oslo. He was the founding director of the interdisciplinary research centre InterMedia at the University of Oslo, focusing on design, communication, and learning in digital environments. He is the director of the Mediatized Stories project which this book draws upon.

Contents: Knut Lundby: Introduction: Digital storytelling, mediatized stories ¿ Ola Erstad/James V. Wertsch: Tales of mediation: Narrative and digital media as cultural tools ¿ Nick Couldry: Digital storytelling, media research and democracy: Conceptual choices and alternative futures ¿ Kirsten Drotner: Boundaries and bridges: Digital storytelling in education studies and media studies ¿ Nancy Thumim: `It¿s good for them to know my story¿: Cultural mediation as tension ¿ Birgit Hertzberg Kaare/Knut Lundby: Mediatized lives: Autobiography and assumed authenticity in digital storytelling ¿ Mark Evan Nelson/Glynda A. Hull: Self-presentation through multimedia: A Bakhtinian perspective on digital storytelling ¿ Kelly McWilliam: Digital storytelling as a `discursively ordered domain¿ ¿ Lotte Nyboe/Kirsten Drotner: Identity, aesthetics, and digital narration ¿ Larry Friedlander: Narrative strategies in a digital age: Authorship and authority ¿ John Hartley: Problems of expertise and scalability in self-made media ¿ Ola Erstad/Kenneth Silseth: Agency in digital storytelling: Challenging the educational context ¿ Elisabeth Staksrud: Fairytale parenting: Contextual factors influencing children¿s online self-representation ¿ David Gauntlett: Creative brainwork: Building metaphors of identity for social science research ¿ Tone Bratteteig: Does it matter that it is digital? ¿ David Brake: Shaping the `me¿ in MySpace: The framing of profiles on a social network site.