Digital storytelling is commonly understood as a narrative-based medium that blends still photography, home video, sound and voice narration into a hyper-short ‘film’, edited to emotively tell an individual, first-person story. While the term is widening over time and some scholars, such as Carolyn Handler Miller (2004), use digital storytelling to include such things as mobile technologies, gaming and device apps, I am particularly interested here in forms of digital storytelling with a more direct relationship to the genre emerging from the Californian-based StoryCenter (formerly Center for Digital Storytelling or the CDS). Other forms of new media storytelling can be found in various locations, but the StoryCenter is responsible for defining digital storytelling as a specific genre that has proliferated globally.

While the StoryCenter began working on a model for digital storytelling in the 1990s, it was not until after the turn of the century that it began to take off as a screen genre. It then spread quickly to Australia and the United Kingdom and has since been adopted in other parts of the world, including Western Europe and South Africa. A genre can be understood as a set of texts that share characteristics in content and form. The content and production processes of the StoryCenter digital storytelling model, as well as the high level of users who have adopted it, allow the model to be understood as a genre of new media (Kaaire 2012).