Everyday Storytelling: Supporting the Mediated Expression of Online Personal Testimony

Personal stories make our everyday experiences memorable over time. This paper presents ‘Everyday Mediated Storytelling’, a model of the casual storyteller’s process of capturing, creating and sharing personal mediated narratives. Based on this model, an online authoring and publishing application for sharing everyday rich-media narratives named ‘Confectionary’ was developed. Results from a lengthy study with a group of committed users signify the success of the Confectionary system as an engaging everyday tool for personal storytelling that stimulated self-reflection, broadened the scope of storytelling strategies demonstrated by its users and supported active audience interpretation. The model, methodology, and system presented in this paper provide a basis for understanding how we move fluidly between our direct experiences, our cognitive and emotional reflections and our storied representations and interpretations. This paper also demonstrates how a spatial everyday authoring and publishing application advances the digital storytelling process from one of media collection to one of storied reflection.