Digital documentaries lend themselves to development across all convergent media. What, if anything, does this new flexibility and global reach have to offer documentary as a social project?
It has been many years since the documentaries present themselves in the television broadcast form. Unlike film documentaries, digital documentaries appear in a multimedia form, and offer different options for viewers’ consumption. Digital documentaries in this context do not only define as a mean of technology for computer, but multimedia, a combination of photographic images, video streaming, sound and text. According to the scholars, John and Patricia both agree to see digital as not only a computer technology but is a combination of numerous technologies and practices that multiply the idea of defining media on the common basis of its delivery system, whereby the information, the images can be remade, stored and retrieved in a variety of ways.[1] And most commonly, digital documentaries utilize the flexibility of multimedia to open up new ways to explore actuality. As such, a social discourse is created between the audiences and the producers. The documentaries makers can achieve this objective by their audiences to participate in the interactive digital documentaries.
In this essay, we will be discussing the possibilities digital documentaries can offer to the social project of documentary. Social project in this context refers to the ability of digital documentary whether or not it can demonstrate a public education and to offer opportunity to the public to engage themselves in an unveiling world.
Firstly, the word ‘documentary’ and ‘digital documentary’ should be defined befor the beginning of the studies. Bill Nichols says in his book, Representing Reality that if the historical world is somehow a place where people meet together in exchanging the social views in an interactive mode, then the world itself has become a topic of cinematic meditation in the reflexive mode.[2] Bill Nichols suggest an even more complex approach by admitting the constructed historical world, that the documentary has not jsut offering access to share the world, however instyead of a world, documentary is offered access to the world. Documentary still carries along with evidence, as Grierson defines the word documentary as a ‘creative treatment of actuality’.[3]
“When the photograph was received , from the beginning, as a document and therefore as evidence.’ [4]
As such of the evidential condition, it was passed to the cinematograph and become the source of ideological power of the documentary film. Like many other film, documentary is officially funded and produced and could have a political role to play in promoting social integration within the liberal reformist state. [5] Digital documentaries, like many other traditional documentaries focus on actual people and events, but digital documentaries also make use of the electronic media to open up new ways to explore actuality. Lisa Spiro in her report says digital documentaries would promote interactivity by putting different forms of media, for instance audio, video, text and image together and enabling viewers to self navigate it on the Internet. [6]
A few recent instances can demonstrate the rich potential digital documentaries in contributing to a social project: the launching of ‘360 degrees’ by Picture Project. It aims to create an innovative web-based tool for political and social reform. The difference between a documentary as a form for mainstream media and a digital documentary are the flexibility, and there is no beginning and ending story of the latter. In ‘360 degrees’, the interactive documentary challenges people in their perception about who is in the prison today and the reasons. It generates the idea to educate on how to reduce the criminals thus strengthen the communities without any imprisonment increment. Many of us who have watched the TV-documentary before and will find the similar experience that is usually we will not remember in details of the documentary. It is presumably that many of the audiences, who have just watched a traditional documentary, whether it is dubbed in a video tape form or from the television network would have just responded to it cognitively. The audiences would find more appeal from the television documentary emotionally. For instance, ‘Least Said, Soonest Mended’, a film documentary produced by Steve Thomas, revealing the secret of Steve’s sister as a relinquishing mother in the 1960s, and the impact on his family when the lid is blown of this adoption story after 30 years of secrecy. Even though this documentary has a repeat screening in channel SBS network, the impact of viewing this documentary is only a fleeting experience. Perhaps the people will find it more appealing if they have a similar experience as a relinquishing mother. In this instance, digital documentary can serve a better role in offering a forum or a place where they can contribute as a support group. Thus, people who have gone through this and are yet to get over the miserable experience can come together as a community to support each other. This support group will not be restricted geographically since the digital documentary is up on the Internet; people around the world who speak English can have access to it.
The digital documentary is unlike traditional documentary ? a One-off thing. Digital documentary still serves its purposes in educating the public by having updating facts in the documentary. In ‘360 degrees’, there are lists of resources ready to be clicked on for those who wish to see advice. It uses online quizzes and surveys, photograph, audio interviews, discussions forums and it includes an interactive timeline to encourage viewers to discover more about the criminal justice system used throughout the decades. By using a series of audio interviews with the people involved in, or affected by a criminal act, ‘360 degrees’ uses Quicktime VR to provide a panoramic view of the places which these people live or work. As such, the viewer’s desire for further information can be fulfilled through the web pages (layered and linked pages of text) which could include additional research, in provide fuller explanations of issues.
Digital documentaries are still likely the same as linear documentary, just as mentioned it is a story-telling mechanism, but unlike fiction film, documentary is a mechanism for addressing non-imaginary and real life issues that might have happened in the present, or in the past time; some digital documentaries would even address and allow the viewers to analyze the issues in future time and its greater depth. Although digital documentary seem to have similar or even better features than linear documentary (film, video), digital documentary itself has challenges in representing the truth if linear documentary has always claimed itself to present real and truth issues. For instance, in ‘Black Harvest’, directed by Robin Anderson and Bob Connolly, Black Harvest studies the intrusion of modern culture on an aboriginal tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Black Harvest is linear documentary that requires the filmmaker and crews to follow the main character, Joe Leahy and the aboriginal people to observe the whole process and what he has been through in the coffee land. Viewers can simply gain insights and the messages of what filmmaker is trying to address, but this would not seem as credible and appealing if the whole story is made in a web format. Perhaps it can, but only to the extend on how the digital documentary is made, whether or not the digital one is full of text only or it still presents in a 90 min Quicktime VR video format and word as texts to speak for itself. The digitality has asked us to think in different ways about images, the structures in spatial imaginaries and their circulation. [7]
Whether or not digital documentary can play a role in social project, it is wholly dependant on the viewers’ responses, do they respond to the documentary makers directly after reading it, watching it, or even have a quick look on it? For example, McSpotlight website, it is created in response to the McDonald’s libel trial in England, but has a great depth and complexity that encourages people to spend days reading the website, knowing and learning the immoral practices of the worldwide fast food industries and their world-wide network of agricultural reordering. If the viewers are able to acknowledge the issues in the fast food industries, and have acted in response to the documentary, i.e. stop buying McDonald fast food, then therefore they are creating a social response to the documentary.
Certainly, the audiences have always been somewhat selective, seeking sources of information and entertainment that fit to their particular needs or interests. Digital documentaries, especially those that are published on the Internet have again narrowed the audiences, as well as their interests. In ‘360 degrees’ website, it let the family members of criminal, criminals and the jurists to come together as a community and to learn about the criminal justice systems. Also in VII Photo Agency, which ahs also published astonishing photos documenting the attack on the World Trade Center on September 2001 as well as the war happened in Afghanistan. This kind of documentary has brought the people together in memorial of the tragic victims. Most of the digital documentaries are considered as a record of history. VII Photo Agency is a website that contains many photographers’ works from different part of the world like in Eastern World, Asia and United States. Even though VII Photo Agency features only images plus text as narrators, viewers can straight away acknowledge the intended messages.
As we discussed earlier, whether or not digital documentary can play a role as a social project is still dependant on the viewers. It is a question of reception.[8] The difference is to be found in the mind of audience. Robert Fairthorne says, ‘Actuality is not a fundamental property, but a relation between the film and audience. Grounding the documentary idea in reception rather than in reality is exactly the way to preserve its validity. It allows for the audience to make the truth claim for the documentary rather than the documentary is claiming for itself. And the actuality depends on the assumption of the particular vaivety in the audience. The audience got to acknowledge that the mechanism used for documentary is mediated by humans, which means the presence of the photographer, is recognized. The camera on their hands still points at a world most people persist in believing is in some way real. The camera can, inevitably does lie, but the world out there is nevertheless real. The only compromise possible is to acknowledge the photographer so that the relation of image depends not on the image’s quality guaranteed by science but on our reception and perception of it as an image of the real guaranteed by our experiences.[9] Only the audience can determine the success of a documentary, whether on digital means or linear documentary. Without such naivety, the audience could not believe that anything real would survive in a creative treatment, and without this beliefs, the social response would not be reformed.
[1] John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmermann, “Transnational/ National Digital Imaginaries.”
1999/2000, (1 September 2003).
[2] Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1991), 56.
[3] Brian Winston, Claiming The Real: The Griersoian Documentary and its Legtimations.
(London: British Film Institute, 1995), 11.
[4] Ibid., 11
[5] Ibid., 11
[6] Lisa Spiro, “Community Report, 2001.” 2001 < http://www.ninch.org/programs/report/spiro.html > (18 September 2003).
[7] Hess and Zimermann, Transnational National Digital Imaginaries, 10
[8] Winston, Claiming The Real, 253
[9] Ibid,. 253
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