Background

When rapid societal transitions happen, like economic hardships, mass migration, outbreaks of violence, or pandemics, people respond by telling stories to attribute meaning to what is occurring to themselves, their relations, and the world they are living in.¹ Besides making sense of the present, this also entails a reconstruction of their past lives as well as an imagination of their future lives.² Rather than merely representing changing realities, people construe both continuity and change in their stories and thereby contribute to the course of societal transitions.³ Hence, these stories are key in understanding the nature and impact of societal transitions.

Stories have a multilayered and multidimensional structure which makes an interdisciplinary approach necessary. A narrative approach, which takes stories as conceptual and analytical starting point for research, has gained momentum over the past three decades in both social sciences and humanities, involving disciplines as diverse as linguistics, history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and future studies.⁴ It is generally acknowledged that stories have a basic plot structure including five narrative components: (1) scenes, in which (2) agents (3) act (4) with particular agency (5) to reach a particular purpose.⁵ The relations between these components need to be taken into account to interpret the meaning of stories. Based on human interpretation, several varieties of stories of continuity and change have been distinguished in different disciplines.⁶ Without being exhaustive, stories may show how transitions result in a loss of meaning; are perceived as manipulations to control citizens; result in a longing for restoration; contribute to life lessons; or foster imagination about change and transformation.

In the fabric of everyday social life, a multitude of stories mutually depends on each other in a changing contextual network.⁷ A main challenge is that stories are told by different actors (like individual citizens, media personalities, influencers, politicians, artists, researchers) through different means (like oral communication, social media, audiovisual modalities) and with different purposes (like witness, create community, persuade). Depending on who tells which stories through which means and for which purposes, some stories tend to become more dominant over time and thereby contribute more to the nature and impact of societal transitions.⁸

In a digital age, storytelling has become even more abundant, rich in variety, and accelerating in pace.⁹ Interestingly, the digital footprints of stories also allow new strategies for collecting naturally occurring or research-induced storytelling. These vary from collections of public broadcasting and web archives to research collections. Yet, actors, means, and purposes of the stories differ between these collections. The turn to human interest in journalism has brought everyday stories to the heart of mainstream media.¹⁰ The worldwide web provides means for storytelling to more official societal institutions, but also to action groups and individual citizens that are not always heard in mainstream media.¹¹ Research collections document the varieties of stories that people tell about their lives, sometimes also with an emancipatory focus of giving people a voice.¹² Whereas these collections are usually not representative of the general population, they all provide a different perspective on the dynamics of digital storytelling in contemporary society.

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2. McAdams, D., & McLean, K. (2013). Narrative identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233-238 Polletta, F., Chen, P. C. B., Gardner, B. G., & Motes, A. (2011). The sociology of storytelling. Annual Review of Sociology, 37, 109–130
   Sools, A. (2020). Back from the future: a narrative approach to study the imagination of personal futures. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 23(4), 451-465
   Westerhof, G. J., Alea, N., & Bluck, S. (2020). Narrative identity: The importance of our personal past in later life. In A. K. Thomas & A. Gutchess (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Aging: A Life Course Perspective (pp. 383-399) ↩

3. Westerhof, G. J., & Bohlmeijer, E. T. (2010). Psychologie van de levenskunst. Amsterdam: Boom ↩

4. Schiff, B., McKim, E., & Patron, S. (2017). Life and narrative: The risks and responsibilities of storying experience. Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press Bohlmeijer, E., Mies, L., Westerhof, G. J. (2007). De betekenis van levensverhalen. Houten: BSL ↩

5. Burke, K. (1969). A grammar of motives. California: University of California Press ↩

6. Dator, J. (2009). Alternative futures at the Manoa School. Journal of Futures Studies, 14(2), 1-18 Frank, A. W. (1995). The wounded storyteller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press McAdams, D. (2006). The redemptive self. New York: Oxford University Press White, H. (2010). The fiction of narrative. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press ↩

7. Phoenix, A. (2008). Analyzing narrative contexts. In M. Andrews, C. Squire and M. Tamboukou (Eds.), Doing narrative research. London: Sage ↩

8. Bamberg, Michael, and Molly Andrews (Eds.) (2004). Considering counter narratives: Narrating, resisting, making sense. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Ochs, E., & Capps, L. (2001). Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press ↩

9. Westerhof, G. J. (2018). Verhaal – digital. Enschede: University of Twente ↩

10. Doherty, S. (2017). Journalism design: Interactive technologies and the future of storytelling. Routledge ↩

11. Hatavara, M., Hyvärinen, M,, Mäkelä, M, & Mäyrä, F. (Eds.) 2015. Narrative theory, literature, and new media: Narrative minds and virtual worlds. New York: Routledge ↩

12. Bourdieu, P. (Ed.). (1991). La misere du monde. Paris: Seuil ↩