Story systems. The potential of transmedia storytelling as material embodiment of a collective enactment of place and identity

The ideas raised in this chapter initially emerged over the course of conceiving and creating the acclaimed multi-year, transmedia Big Stories, Small Towns participatory documentary project (bigstories.com.au). The project has facilitated the telling, recording, archiving and dissemination of over 500 intimate auto/biographical narratives across thirteen towns in six countries to over 1 million viewers.

Big Stories was initiated in 2008 with the belief that every community has a living memory and collective identity woven together from a thousand stories. Recognising the intrinsic value of telling and documenting stories – with the active involvement of participants using a variety of media and technologies – reveals emergent and complex processes. The inter-twined combination of context, process, form and relationships heightened through the use of technology is a complex adaptive system. While a level of interconnectivity has always underpinned storytelling within communities, shifting global dynamics and new mediums allow for an alternative examination of multi-layered communities and the complex relations between people, social backgrounds, technology/ media and place. This represents a fundamental shift away from a centralised vision of storymaking (i.e. author/documenter-centric). Thus, this chapter moves attention from the rhetoric of texts to practices of community organisation and technological and embodied material relations, both of which aspire to produce a collectively enacted sense of place and identity.