Editorial: mediatized stories: mediation perspectives on digital storytelling

There is an explosion of digital means by which people can shape and share stories about themselves. New media and new conditions of telling ‘my’ or ‘our’ story are open to more individuals and groups in society.This special section of New Media & Society relates to such self-representational uses of the new means. Digital stories made by amateurs may encourage social participation in those contexts where the stories are produced and used.The kind of digital storytelling to be discussed here opens new ways of participation: in ‘story circles’ offline, as well as online peer contact on social networking sites.The following two articles discuss the emergent space of self-representational digital storytelling, with its risks and its opportunities for democracy and individual identity formation in media-saturated societies. Although small-scale and bottom-up, these mediated self-narrative practices are prisms through which to look into the significant social consequences of new media. ‘Digital storytelling’, as suggested by Nick Couldry in this issue p. 374, means ‘the whole range of personal stories now being told in potentially public form using digital media resources’.