Documentary Practice - Emerging Media

Emerging Media

New documentary practices associated with cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema began to appear in the mid-1950s when technological developments made film and then video more portable, accessible and affordable. This allowed more people to engage in the practice of documenting. The 1991 video of Rodney King being subjected to police restraint is an example of the continuing power of this shift. An ordinary citizen was able to capture the police brutality with his camcorder, transforming him from a witness to an amateur documentary filmmaker. Scholars have cited the events following the widespread dissemination of the Rodney King video as one of the earliest examples of "participatory culture."

Today's new media continue to reshape documentary practices in significant ways. Recording technologies embedded within personal portable devices such as video-equipped mobile phones and hand-held digital video and still cameras have made it possible for vast numbers of people to engage in citizen journalism and "documentary practices." Additionally, Web 2.0 platforms such as video and photo-sharing websites and blogs now enable amateur "documentarians" to share and collaborate on content in ways never before possible. A practice that Howard Rheingold and Justin Hall have labeled p2p Journalism, now exists at the blurred boundary where traditional definitions of journalism and documentary meet and influence each other.

Promises of new media technologies have raised expectations of a freer flow of ideas and content. Scholars are studying how participants in documenting practices engage in the social process of acquiring knowledge, sharing stories, and documenting events-in-the-making. Through such practices, social ties among people and groups as they arbitrate what qualifies as knowledge evolve continuously, facilitating the emergence of what Pierre Lévy refers to as collective intelligence.

By enabling more people to record and share their experiences, emerging media technologies have transformed the way people document reality and how they participate in the very events that they are documenting. Everyday life can become performative as people respond to encounters and events through documentary practices, creating records of daily life which they then share with others via the Internet. For many people, digital media-making becomes a form of documentary practice when the results are created for and shared via social-networking sites like MySpace, Flickr and Facebook.

The 2006 documentary of a Beastie Boys concert, Awesome; I F***n' Shot That!, directed by Adam Yauch, is an example of how participation in documentary practices transforms the way people take part in events such as concerts. A live performance in 2004 was documented by 50 fans who were all given Hi8 cameras and told to film their experience of the concert. Their footage was later edited together with professionally shot footage. It provided contrasting points of view and established dialogue between artists and fans.

Some scholars argue that as an increasingly widespread practice, the nascent cellphone documentary genre creates more possibilities and forms of social agency; people use cell phones to document public events and network their collective responses; others have used their phones to mobilize crowds during public demonstrations.