So, I’ve scored myself an iBook through a project I’m involved with at QUT (you gotta love the place sometimes), and have started research for the chapter of my thesis on the technological shaping of amateurism, using Apple’s iLife suite of “creative” software as a detailed case study.

Always in my peripheral vision is the nascent collaborative project (i.e. something a few cronies and I talk about over coffee but have done nothing about yet) exploring zero-budget digital storytelling. That is, looking at the range of free, open-source or OS-bundled software to see whether you could effectively substitute some combination of them for the very expensive proprietary tools usually used – Photoshop and Premiere. The reason we think this is important is that, by relying on photoshop and premiere, and teaching digital storytelling using them, we’re only increasing digital storytelling’s dependence on the institutional resources that I had previously thought were necessary to get it going, but might one day subside in favour of collective/networked autonomy. It seems clear that from a purely economic point of view, the reliance on Adobe products is disquietingly counter to the spirit of DIY that, in other ways, the digital storytelling movement is all about.

Of course, the iLife suite is positioned in precisely this way, not least because of Apple’s integration into (US) schools and the co-promotion of iMovie and iPhoto as trojan horse literacy tools (whereby students with challenges in written literacies who are confident in their visual and oral literacies become storytellers through the process of creating multimedia stories). A nicely written reflection on one such initiative here.

The catch for me (and this is the catch with *all* digital storytelling setups I’ve found so far) is not only that the enthusiastic takeup of digital storytelling by schools, universities, government departments, community activist groups and corporations necessarily serves institutional ends, but also that it is cutting off DST’s potential to proliferate virally, stabilising an emergent genre before its time, creating too many rules and conventions before it has had a chance to develop possibilities, becoming polished and relentlessly interesting and losing its ordinariness, becoming just another tool for computer-assisted learning, another vehicle for Illich’s counterfeit vernacular.

To bastardise an already misunderstood quote from the fabulously cranky utopian Stuart Hall, digital storytelling might be one of the sites at which vernacular creativity gains a foothold and viral publics for ordinary creative communication are consituted – otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it.

Then again, I can’t afford to be cranky, complicit as I am in the instutional support of digital storytelling.