Here’s a couple of the participants in the YIRN Digital Storytelling Workshops at Visible Ink putting the final touches to their films in Adobe Premiere. The trainer in the shot is Jo Tacchi

They all finished in the three and a half days total workshop time and the results were great. Once they’re up on the YIRN website I’ll be able to link to the Quicktime versions.

I’ve been writing up fieldnotes about this workshop, reflecting mainly on how we (trainers and participants included) negotiated some of the tensions I’m exploring in my thesis.

It’s early here, and it’s a Sunday, and I’ve been thinking a lot. Regular readers know that means patience is required to read on….

I felt we were all negotiating around the tensions between a universally legible aesthetic vs. whatever flavour of experimentalism we might otherwise try; “programming” subject matter and visual aesthetic vs. hands-off facilitation of “organic” creativity; etc. It was interesting for me to note that two of the participants who were very media-savvy were comfortable with ?rough? edges and apparent ?mistakes? (and confident in their own aesthetic decisions, weighing our suggestions on their own merits but just as often rejecting them and deliberately including rough, home-made design elements).

On the other hand, other participants with more mainstream cultural competences and cultural tastes were committed to a smooth finish ? reflecting mainstream television/cinema production values ? and asking for ?editorial? input from the trainers, hesitant to made ad hoc judgements (e.g. about whether to use cuts or dissolves, zooms or pans in Premiere).

Which brings me back to some core worries about enabling a broader base of cultural participation through cultural production: how am I going to deal with the [apparent] fact that any postive cultural value that is ascribed to amateur production is tied up with youth, hipness, funky lofi, DIY aesthetics etc., whereas the people I feel have the least access to our *attention* through something like digital storytelling employ a media vernacular that is less tied up with punk rock and activist media, and more closely aligned with commercial television and Hollywood cinema?

That is, it isn’t just “media access” that is the issue here, it’s access to cultural value and audience engagement: access to our attention and to the privilege of authorship.

I’m thinking the answer is to reorient our aspirations toward a “vernacular” cultural sphere from the ground up: the answer is *networks*: networks of producers who are also critics and consumers and teachers and learners, without having to be self-aware, camp or parodic media fans, avid gamers or obsessive bloggers…