Digital (Hi)Story Telling with Social Media: A project about participatory history culture
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Profile
- Project leadership
- Christian Mathis (PHZH)
- Organisational unit
- F-FD (Fachdidaktische Forschung)
- Project phase
- Completed (1.3.2022 – 31.12.2025)
- Project type
- Research & development project
- Funding
- PH Zurich
- Participating institutions
- Ionian University Corfu, Greece
Description
Adolescents in a digitalised environment
Netflix, Spotify & Co. set the tone for adolescents in Switzerland and Greece. Thanks to flat-rate streaming, more than half of young people have unlimited access to films, music, or games. Adolescents communicate mainly by cell phone via Instagram, Whatsapp, or Snapchat. Mobile phones are most often used for chatting, surfing, or social networking. The most popular social networks are Instagram, Snapchat, and recently Tiktok. The self-estimated usage time of mobile phones: on a weekend day, it is around five hours. During the week, it is more than three hours a day. Internet use, on the other hand, has decreased (James Study 2020).
Current media cultures in digital contexts
Current media cultures in digital contexts are not only characterised by their specific form of interplay between data-based and networked infrastructures, algorithmic processes, and the interlocking of hardware, software, and interfaces. Rather, they also shape our present in a variety of ways. The influence of digital transformation on historical narratives and education has already been addressed for several years. As König (2020) emphasises social media’s low production and access barriers have led to a multiplication of history-related content, actors, and practices.
History in social media as a micro-practice of historical culture
We understand the reception and production of social media content as micro-practices of a participatory culture which is characterised by affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem-solving, and circulations (Jenkins 2009; 2016). If in any way these micro-practices address the past and/or history, they can be interpreted as phenomena of history culture (Rüsen 2013). In this way, the micro-practices become historical-cultural micro-practices - a sort of doing history. Therefore, we understand micro-practices as aesthetic, social, cultural, and participatory procedures of doing history in social media. These micro-practices always refer to macrostructures from which the subjects are not free.
Research agenda and research questions
This international research project is done in cooperation with Dr Elias Stouraitis from Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. The comparative study includes the following stages:
- How students use Tiktok and Instagram during their everyday life (interviews and questionnaire)
- How students develop their digital narratives through a methodology (performative procedure: pre-production process, production process, post-production process, the product itself – as a presentation process).
- How teachers can use new media, such as Tiktok and Instagram so that students create critical and multimodal historical narratives. The project will create educational material for teachers using themes, such as museum content (e.g., slavery, women’s rights movement).