Exploring Instagram stories through the classic model of digital storytelling

Abstract

Digital storytelling has taken on new avatars with the immense growth of Web 2.0 technologies, such as social media. From the classical digital storytelling model, the new ways of storytelling now enable the embedding of various media elements into the digital story. Hence, the definition and interpretation of digital stories in various digital media vary. Digital storytelling can be interpreted as Web 2.0 media storytelling and gets more exciting and vital as the usage of digital stories in such media grows exponentially. Thus, this paper presents a pilot study exploring how digital storytelling manifests on Instagram stories, the widely used social media tool. This pilot study used the relevance sampling technique to sample 100 digital Instagram stories from nine Instagram accounts. The sample stories were analysed through qualitative content analysis (QCA) using Atlas.ti to determine how strongly digital stories posted in Instagram’s “Stories” feature align with the classic digital storytelling model by Joe Lambert. The outcome of this exploratory pilot study shows a significant alignment of digital stories from Instagram with the classic model defined by Joe Lambert in his book, Digital Storytelling Cookbook. Hence, the findings could justify using Instagram stories as digital stories for academic and industrial drives.