Digital Words of Wisdom? Digital Storytelling with Older People – Ponderings of a (fairly) new PhD Research Candidate and a (growing) older Digital Storytelling practitioner

Digital Storytelling is over 20 years old, its roots in citizen activism, its techniques evolving from radical theatre and media arts and its primary driver an unwavering commitment to enabling people to find and share their stories, as well as to the valuing of each and every one of those stories. This paper builds upon a presentation given at “Digital Storytelling in a Time of Crisis”, an international Digital Storytelling conference that took place in Athens in May 2014. It sets out to map some of the territory around Digital Storytelling and older people – ageing and the old (specifically the costs associated with a growing older population) being the ‘crises’ in question. The paper discusses questions concerning the benefits of Digital Storytelling with older people – both active older people and those who have dependency needs associated with ageing, such as dementia. The questions focus on the measurement of value, both in terms of participation in Digital Storytelling as a process and in the stories themselves. The paper is also self-reflective, as the writer embarks upon the formal route of PhD research, questioning the assumed benefits of the practice that has dominated the last eight years of over thirty years as a teacher and avid promoter of participatory media as a means to 1Tricia Jenkins is a co Founder-Director of Digitales Ltd. in London (www.digi-tales.org.uk) and a PhD research student at Middlesex University (www.mdx.ac.uk), London. Digitales is a not-forprofit research and Digital Storytelling company hosted by the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London (www.gold.ac.uk). Her research interests are in Digital Storytelling as a specific practice, the benefits of participation for older people and the value of digital stories as qualitative narrative data. DigiTales is a key partner in the EU funded Silver Stories transnational project, http://silverstories.ipleiria.pt/?lang=en. She can be contacted at tricia@digi-tales.org.uk or t.jenkins@mdx.ac.uk.

indicting those of us who have reached our sixties for… well for what, exactly? We have been blamed for every social and moral blight, from housing and fiscal crises to environmental pollution, while also being held responsible for all the insecurities, moral laxities and any other imputed fears, anxieties or vices of the generation we reared (Segal 2013, p. 47) Segal also points out that dominant narratives associated with ageing focus on 'resilience' stories in which we postpone the ageing process, or they swoop upon the state that is our greatest fear, in which we face cognitive deterioration. Dementia is clearly a growing concern, as greater numbers of people become afflicted because they are living longer, however it is not a foregone conclusion that we will all become cognitively impaired! It is not the only growing old story.
Whilst traditional gerontology focuses largely on the physical states associated with the chronology of ageing, humanist gerontologists have, over the last twenty years or so, shifted the focus to exploring what it feels like to grow old. At the Seventh International Symposium on Cultural Gerontology and the Inaugural Conference of the European Network in Ageing Studies (ENAS, http://www.agingstudies.eu) Jan Baars speaks of ageing as being rooted in time, "yet time is usually reduced to chronometric time; a mere measurement that has been emptied of the narratives that were traditionally part of it" (Baars 2012 :143). He emphasises the importance of collaboration between the sciences and humanities in relation to Ageing Studies in order to challenge the dominance of chronometric time in the generation of studies and statistics, which conceals the impact of social, political and cultural macro-narratives on the destinies of ageing people.
Moreover, "it is argued that micro-narratives remain important for empirical studies of ageing as they articulate human experiences, but that narratives also play an increasingly important role in systemic worlds and life worlds" (Baars 2012: 143).
So, returning to the 'crisis' narratives: are spending, service and policy decisions relating to ageing drawing significantly on the input and insight of those who have first-hand experience of what it is like to be old? In this digital age, in which not only are public services and information increasingly shifting to digital platforms, but so are the fora in which to 'have your say', are the micro-narratives of older people able to penetrate the plethora of personal narratives available through social media platforms and online campaigns? Can Digital Storytelling as a process 'give voice' to older people -and which older people? More importantly, if digital micro-narratives are produced by older people, are they being listened to -by the right people, by enough people? Does Digital Storytelling as a movement provide a prominent enough platform for personal, individual stories to gather the momentum required to become the stories relating to the group 'older people' -the stories that will influence or change policy, practices and perceptions?
As Hartley (2013: 71) discusses, how do we address 'the problem of how to "scale up" from self-expression to communication… and the question of the role that stories play in constituting "we"-communities (or "demes")'.

Why am I Doing This?
As a teacher and a practitioner of participatory media for some thirty years, over the last ten years, Digital Storytelling has re-kindled some of my early personal drivers for working in this field. My politics were strongly influenced by the Marxist theorists shaping the curriculum of my film and theatre studies minor course at university in the late 1970s. Using semiotic analysis to challenge the Leavisite traditionalist approaches favoured by my English Literature major course, my dissertation focused on working class novelists of the 1930s -I wanted to write about the form and content of the stories of those who were not in the great canon -the stories of 'ordinary people'.
Media Studies as a subject to be taught in schools and colleges as well as in Higher Education, was emerging at the beginning of the 1980s and I was part of the second year's intake of London University Institute of Education's Post Graduate Certificate in Education training to teach English and Media Studies in secondary schools and further education 2 . I felt part of a 'movement', excited by the potential and energy of this new field to effect positive change. When you set out on a career in which you are constantly defending your field against traditionalists trashing your trade (how often have we heard 'mickey mouse' as a prefix to descriptions of media studies over the last thirty years?), you identify with your peers in being part of a 'struggle'. This, at the beginning of one's working life journey, is an irresistible narrative … or at least it was for me.
Digital Storytelling is a means of self-expression brought about through a process of deep reflection, shared with others in the Story Circle. It is an international movement of practitioners from across the globe, using facilitated workshops to 'enable ordinary people to tell their own stories using digital means of production, editing, archiving and distribution (Hartley 2013;Lambert 2006;Meadows et al 2006;Hartley & McWilliam 2009;Lundby 2009 (Hartley and McWilliam, 2009), which was arguably the first publication to collect together accounts of Digital Storytelling from around the world and even in the Acknowledgments thanks the publisher 'for taking on a topic that is not yet fully embedded in educational courseware'. Now I see my Digital Storytelling colleagues at conferences; we collaborate across borders on international projects; we connect, share and ask for help on our Facebook DS Working Group 3 , which is accessible by invitation and describes its membership thus: We are practitioners, researchers, companies and social workers using Digital Storytelling as a way to reflect on our work, stimulate communication and generate social change.
In the Introduction to the Fourth Edition of Digital Storytelling, Capturing Lives, Creating Community, Joe Lambert describes Digital Storytelling as "having evolved to become an international movement of deeply committed folks working with story in virtually every field of human endeavour" (Lambert 2013:1) As I approached my mid-fifties, being part of this movement enabled me to reignite a passion for work. At this stage in life, it feels good to belong to something that seems to have such a profound impact on those who facilitate and upon those who participate. I gave up a well-paid but deeply unsatisfying job to turn all of my attention to developing and delivering Digital Storytelling projects.
At the same time, in 2013, I was awarded a PhD Studentship at Middlesex University, London. This has provided the opportunity to immerse myself fully in Digital Storytelling as the focus of my investigation. It has also led me to having to ask some difficult questions of the very practice that feeds my soul.
What are the Benefits of Digital Storytelling with Older People? This is the title of my research. Why the focus on older people? Partly it was through involvement with the project 'Extending Creative Practice' (www.extendingcreativepractice.eu) which won an award for good practice and piloted using Digital Storytelling with older people as a means of addressing digital exclusion. It led to a subsequent project, which is currently running at the time of writing, called 'Silver Stories' (http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/silver-stories) 4 which seeks to upscale the uptake of Digital Storytelling as part of the professional toolkit of those who are training to work in health and social care environments with older people.
Extending Creative Practice Participant Liisa Helenius describes her experience of learning how to make digital stories at Silver Stories 'Transfer of Innovation' workshop at Laurea, University of Applied Science, Espoo, Finland.

Watch Liisa's story : Sauna Sisters
Unsurprisingly, the ageing agenda provides funded opportunities for research and projects that address the needs of older people. However, the reason for proposing the research is not simply opportunistic. I have a particular interest in the uses of Digital Storytelling with people who are living with dementia, and their carers. That is a nod to my late father, who lived with dementia for some years, but lost his 'voice' rapidly when he was absorbed into a nursing home environment, where listening -at all, to anyone -was not on top of the priority list. I had a gut feeling that digital stories could be tremendously powerful in terms of influencing care provision, providing opportunities for carers to share their stories with others as they progress through their journeys with loved ones, or with patients or residents in care homes. The groundbreaking work of Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner in Patient Voices' (www.patientvoices.org.uk) "Dangling Conversations" project presents evidence of significant benefit to both the storytellers themselves, all of whom had early stage dementia, as well as in their use as learning materials for nurses.
There are many pockets of evidence of the benefits of Digital Storytelling, which the research process is helping me to uncover (thanks to the community of Digital Storytelling practitioners who so generously share their work), such as the Colorado Culture Change Coalition/Center for Digital Storytelling's project 'From The Heart' (2012, http://www.coculturechange.org/#!stories_of_change/c1kwk) in which ten staff members from six nursing homes each produced stories that showed personal and professional transformations. The staff members then helped one resident from each of their homes tell their own story about a moment of change.
Perhaps the other reason for focusing on ageing is to do with the life-stage at which I find myself. Losing both parents between 2007 and 2009 re-positioned me in the family tree.
Perhaps it was when I noticed that, when completing surveys, in the commonly used age groupings I seem to have only one more to go! An observation by a speaker at an event in As the ageing population grows there has been some debate amongst those researching and studying the older population. Rather than using the term 'older people' it may be more useful to think of old age as having several life phases with different qualities. Proposals have been made, for example, to distinguish between the 'young old the old, and the oldest old (e.g., Neugarten,1974;Suzman, Willis, & Manton, 1992) and between the Third Age and Fourth Age (e.g. Baltes, 1997;Laslett, 1991). Third Age refers to the life period of active retirement, which follows the first age of childhood and formal education and the second age of working life, and which precedes the fourth age of dependence. (Rooke and Slater, 2012:8) None of these definitions is satisfactory.   This exemplifies the potential for using Digital Storytelling to represent older people and to influence change across generations. It looks to the stories of the participants to influence the now and the future -not simply to reminisce about the past, which seems to be the focus of so much participatory arts activity with older people. It counters what Jan Baars regards as an "overall loss of respect for ageing, to the point that understanding and 'dealing with' ageing people has become a process focused on the decline of potential and the advance of disease, rather than the accumulation of wisdom and the creation of new skills" 8 .
However, it also begs some crucial questions: could a project like this project be up- Value Project (see www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funded-Research/Funded-themes-andprogrammes/Cultural-Value-Project) which has been working towards "establishing a framework that will advance the way in which we talk about the value of cultural engagement and the methods by which we evaluate that value" (ibid). In the arts across the board, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of the value of engagement with culture.
The same can be said for Digital Storytelling. Our problem is that, as with so much of our work, we move from project to project, funder to funder and the associated evidence that is produced through evaluation is linked usually to the purposes for which the intervention has been funded, whether that is digital inclusion, or reflective learning, or the training of healthcare professionals for example. The Cultural Value project has been undertaken to provide a broader approach to generating evidence of value, drawing upon a wide range of academic disciplines including humanities, cognitive sciences, social sciences, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. 9 My research intends, similarly, to develop a framework specifically to measure the benefits of Digital Storytelling with older people -both the process of participation, the longer-term impact on individual participants and the value of the stories themselves.
The intention of the research is to draw upon a range of disciplines across the Humanities workshops. The evaluation, which was undertaken by the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths, University of London, revealed that not only had key objectives been met, but that a further emerging theme that was revealed was a reassessment of the place of older people in society through their Digital Storytelling. Rooke and Slater (2012, p.21) state "while it is important to acknowledge older people's pasts and personal histories, the risk of a focus on reminiscence is that it can symbolically locate older people in the past, as 'living history' ". They go on to observe that the Digital Storytelling methodology enables us to challenge attitudes: the power of combining approaches to storytelling which draw on resources from the past (such as memories, photographs, stories, films) together with digital technology has provided opportunities for older people (in this project) to rethink how they may wish to structure and communicate their narratives now and into the future (p21).
The project -and these findings -raises some crucial questions. How 'digitally included', then' are the participants in this project after one experience of making a digital story? If, Ever Decreasing (Story) Circles?
When I first began on my PhD journey, it was a difficult switch. As I started out, revisiting literary and narrative theories that I had not really touched for thirty years or so and finding some academic writings near impenetrable, I had the distinct feeling of going in ever decreasing circles. I have had to learn to 'read' again. Switching from fundraising or consultant mode continues to challenge. At the beginning, I felt that it was so much more purposeful to identify a funding opportunity, read the guidelines, find the partners, make a case for support identifying a need and proving that my proposal would provide the outcomes required in the language of the funder's agenda. Post submission, a period of a few or many months would pass before either a red light rejection or a green flag to go ahead and deliver the Digital Storytelling workshops I love to do. Why change that?
The Extending Creative Practice project demonstrated that certainly in Romania, facilitated Digital Storytelling workshops that are now on offer as part of mainstream library provision across the whole country, can be a sustainable model. However, we need to ask some questions about provision and purpose. If Digital Storytelling is always available, is there enough focus, enough drive to result in meaningful experiences and powerful stories that can be used to effect change -at whatever level, small-scale or for the greater good?
As my research progresses, the act of questioning, challenging and constructing new ways of assessing the benefits of participating in Digital Storytelling for individuals, in trying to find a way in which to gather stories and identify their value more broadly and in contributing to the development of the Digital Storytelling movement is something that feels timely and worthwhile. How do we get beyond the paradox of the movement and the method's capacity to 'give voice', whilst being so often dependent upon one-off funded interventions because the practice recognises the centrality of facilitation, rather than the DIY approach of current mainstream social media practices? Notions such as 'giving voice' in the absence of any systematised ways of amplifying those voices is clearly problematic. Hartley calls the movement to action: Given that digital media and social networks have already made what constitutes 'our' deme more risky, complex, open, uncertain and multivalent than ever before, it is urgent for progressive innovations like the Digital Storytelling movement to catch up (2013:103).
Hartley is right -digital stories, as we define them, do not tend to go viral and sometimes they remain offline, depending on the wishes of the storytellers. However, we need to assess the impact on individuals, both storytellers and the audiences with whom they share their stories in individual and community settings in a way that reaches beyond the anecdotal.
As a practitioner, I remain firmly convinced that Digital Storytelling is an important social movement and that, perhaps, large-scale change is not where its ambitions should lie. As a researcher, I am looking for avenues of inquiry and theoretical approaches that will enable me to reach beyond conviction and anecdote.
And slowly, and hesitantly, I am finding my academic voice.