“Storytelling” has become yet another buzz-word, not only in marketing and corporate branding, but increasingly in development cooperation. It is typically deployed in the context of participatory communication approaches, providing means for people to tell their life stories, often with the employment of digital media (i.e. ‘digital storytelling’). But storytelling can of course also be part of a top-down dissemination approach, as social marketing, or a combination of communication strategies, as in edutainment, i.e. conveying messages in fictional stories, through theatre, comics, radio, TV series, etc. Storytelling can in fact imply almost everything. In Wikipedia, it is defined as follows:
“Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, images, and sounds often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation, and in order to instill moral values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot, characters, and narrative point of view. […]Traditionally, oral stories were committed to memory and then passed from generation to generation. However, in the most recent past, written and televised media have largely surpassed this method communicating local, family and cultural histories.”
The vast definition becomes unintentionally comical. One may ask what the point is in using a term so general that it encompasses practically all human culture and communication... Read more