ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits the notion of the ‘bardic function’. It is an attempt to locate self-made and person ally published media, including both community-based initiatives like digital storytelling and commercial enterprises like YouTube, within a much longer historical context of popular narration. Broadcast TV has been a household-based ‘read-only’ medium, with a strong demarcation between highly capitalised expert-professional producers and untutored amateur domestic consumers. Broadband ‘TV’ is a customised ‘read-write’ medium, where self-made audiovisual ‘content’ can be exchanged between all agents in a social network, which may contain any number of nodes ranging in scale from individual, to family-and-friends, to global markets. The function of the ‘bardic function’ is to textualise the world meaningfully for a given language community. For humans, storytelling itself is a form of schooling in the capabilities of language. One of the earliest social mechanisms used to improve bardic quality was the eisteddfod.
