Prato CIRN 2008 Community Informatics Conference: ICTs for Social Inclusion: What is the Reality? Refereed Paper 1 The Story Economy: Digital Storytelling in Economic and Community Development Mike Nutt 1 and Gilson Schwartz 2 1 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Communication Studies, United States of America 2 Universidade de São Paulo, City of Knowledge, Brazil Abstract: It is difficult to underestimate the importance of storytelling. In every community, local or global, physical or virtual, it is one of the fundamental building blocks of meaning. From an outsider’s perspective, it may sometimes seem as if members of low-wealth, repressed, exploited, and underdeveloped communities have little besides the social connections and events that make up their own stories. In the context of a proliferating global information economy, however, we find that the story gains a renewed place of power. Today, the digital story is a storable, retrievable and value-creating knowledge asset, a personal icon and a source of qualitative data, a currency for social capital. The authors argue that these disenfranchised communities, often relegated to an underserved economic status in industrial society, may in fact be able to leverage their unique knowledge assets for participation in the mainstream, digitally interconnected, post-industrial economy, through a bottom-up approach to economic development. Digital storytelling allows a community to learn and practice valuable media production skills that in turn provide greater economic mobility and social visibility. Digital storytelling simultaneously offers a potential solution to problems created by technology dissemination initiatives like One Laptop Per Child. Such initiatives may focus on hardware distribution to the exclusion of culturally sensitive integration. Hardware and software can instead be incorporated into existing social structures and articulated through community values when community members use media production technologies to tell their stories, thereby introducing new technologies, developing marketable skills, and dealing with real and local issues. Keywords: media production, digital emancipation, digital literacy, pedagogy, social entrepreneurship, third space, iconomics Introduction Community-based professionals are often concerned with those who are of few resources. We work with communities that have lost resources they once had – or perhaps those assets were taken away. Maybe political, economic, and social forces combine to deny a community access to the tools of development. Or maybe our political schemas, our economic systems, and our cultural constructs do not even allow us to recognize certain community activities and assets as resources. There are surely other failures of our ideological imaginations that prevent a more inclusive and holistic approach to community empowerment. One such example is the unrealized potential of the story. It is hard to underestimate the importance of the story to humanity, because it is both a means and an end. We weave together cause and effect in an effort to uncover truth, and so narrative is our fundamental building block of meaning and understanding. Our best definition of ‘truth’ may simply be “a story to which we can all agree.” Storytelling is both simple and powerful, and these two characteristics make it a valuable tool in the struggle for social justice: everyone understands stories and everyone has a story. Indeed, there is a macabre inverse correlation between abject circumstances and narrative. Absolute poverty, for example, can only be the result of a tragic narrative. Such stories have