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.
