Instagram women's stories and the power of digital storytelling in the context of fourth-wave feminism: The case of @onlyherstory

In the last few decades, with the rapid development of communication technologies and the spread of new media environments and the Internet, many structures, tools and concepts have undergone transformation, as well as changes in the social dimensions. One of the areas affected by this ongoing transformation with digitalization is storytelling, which is considered an ancient tradition and wisdom, and one of the most effective and powerful tools of transmitting information and messages that affects the audience's emotions and logic, creating awareness and changing perspective through persuasion. Storytelling, whose roots go back to primitive societies, was first oral, then written, and today has taken its place in virtual environments by incorporating technology consisting of various multimedia types such as graphics, audio, text, video and animation. The other consists of the changes experienced by women's efforts to have equal rights and opportunities in different periods of history in parallel with the media and communication tools. After the waves referred to as the first, second and third that developed on the axis of traditional media, there comes the fourth wave of feminism, which emerged with the use of digital technologies and the Internet for feminist activism and discussions. Thus, social media channels with an interactive and participatory nature, which serve to create a feminist social memory, increase visibility of women's issues through digital storytelling, especially by featuring women's stories and experiences and offering them the opportunity to comment and discuss. In this study, the women's stories shared on the 'onlyherstory' Instagram account, which contributes to the creation of a digital feminist memory using the oral history method fed by feminist theory and feminist interpretation of history, and conveys ordinary and real women's stories with literary language and real photos by taking advantage of the power of digital storytelling, and the comments made on these stories are examined by content analysis method. As a result of this study, there are findings that by increasing the visibility of women's issues in the context of the themes contained in these stories, the 'silent generation' women who are the heroes of these stories are almost the voice, the stories create deep and emotional interactions on readers, as well as a serious awareness and cognitive, emotional and behavioural change and transformation that contribute to raising feminist consciousness about gender inequality and the existence of a patriarchal order that oppresses and makes women invisible. It is concluded that women's stories in which digital storytelling is used to function as a powerful and effective social transformative tool in raising feminist consciousness. Keywords: Digital Storytelling, Fourth Wave Feminism, New Media, Women Stories, Raising Feminist Consciousness