New Documentary Ecologies

Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses

K. Nash, C. Hight, C. Summerhayes, K. Nash, C. Hight, C. Summerhayes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137310484
• eBook ISBN: 9781137310491
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Providing a unique collection of perspectives on the persistence of documentary as a vital and dynamic media form within a digital world, New Documentary Ecologies traces this form through new opportunities of creating media, new platforms of distribution and new ways for audiences to engage with the real.

Part I

Expanding Documentary

1

Documentary Ecosystems: Collaboration and Exploitation

Jon Dovey

Introduction

In this chapter I take the book’s title at face value and examine emergent documentary practices within the ecosystems of the digital media landscape. Thinking ecologically suggests we look at big pictures, at the whole assemblage of agents that constitute documentary ecosystems. This attempt immediately becomes a daunting task. The sheer profusion of what we might identify as documentary materials is overwhelming. Documentation and recording of our everyday lives is the superabundant fruit that seeds and sustains the Internet: it is overwhelming. These fragments of actuality and glimpses into other people’s lives are everywhere, but they don’t make much sense in a happenstance browser flow determined by invisible search logics. While we might derive a powerful sense of affective attachment from our own friends and followers, few of the posts we encounter on a daily basis add up to much of a narrative, much less an argument, position or analysis. Yet the content of the blogosphere, of Facebook, Twitter or Flickr is factual, journalistic, expressive, everyday – the precise ground of documentary materials and research. These shards of demotic chatter as public mediation are permanently reconfiguring our memory of media form. Wisps of twentieth century media ‘DNA’ curl through the system conjoining and mutating into forms of expression that have the memory of film or music or news or a novel but in reality demand very new forms of practice in public address, in political economy and in ethics. In this chapter I set out to investigate one such instance of emergent form, the ‘Living documentary’. The ideas here draw heavily on my collaborators in the iDocs conference network, the work of Sandra Gaudenzi and in particular on the work of Mandy Rose, Director of the Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Mandy’s work has introduced me to a number of key examples cited here and her thinking in our two previously co-authored papers underpins much of what follows.

Contexts

In attempting a specific, detailed analysis of the relationships between documentary and the new ecologies of digital media I want to focus on the twin dynamics of collaboration and exploitation as they are at work in emerging practices. To understand the rhythm and impact of these forces I call on three dominant critical frameworks: the culturalist perspective that offers generally enthusiastic analysis of the human potential enacted in online spaces; post-Marxist attempts to understand the ‘political economy’ of digital culture; and the media ecologists’ frameworks that point towards understanding media as living systems.

As a video activist and writer formed through the politics of the 1970s I begin with a sympathy for those culturalists that emphasise the explosion of human creativity and self-realisation made possible through the digital. More recently a body of scholarship has developed arguments that the explosion of ‘vernacular creativity’ (Burgess and Green 2009, p. 25) made possible by digital has a significant and novel democratic force. Jenkins et al. (2006) argue that when combined with the new affordances of collaboration and sharing built into online systems we can observe the emergence of a new ‘participatory culture’ that is characterised by: ‘Affiliation’, elective group formation in online community around enthusiasms, issues or common cultures; ‘Expression’, music, video, and design tools in the hands of far more users than ever before and being used for every kind of human mode of communication; ‘Collaborative Problem-solving’ mobilising collective intelligence, crowdfunding, online petition making, alternate reality gaming, wiki-based shared knowledge practices; and ‘Circulations’ playing an active role in directing media dynamics through the new flows of viral media driven by Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

This analysis takes popular form where arguments are made that the new affordances of digital media and social networking are creating: new modes of capitalism (Tapscott and Williams 2006); transformative modes of ‘cognitive surplus’ (Shirkey 2010); and new modes of collaborative innovation (Leadbetter 2008). These emergent modes of participation, it is argued, develop new kinds of mediated citizenship characterised by ‘the pursuit of self-organising, reflexive, common purpose among voluntary co-subjects, who learn about each other and about the state of play of their interests though the media’ (Hartley 2010, p. 17). Documentary has of course always claimed a particular place for itself in the process of media citizenship, in Nichols’ well known phrase as a ‘discourse of sobriety’ (1991, pp. 3–4) with a privileged address to the state and the citizen. In an essay published in 2008 documentary theorist Patricia Zimmerman argued that documentary’s understanding of its public role needed to adapt in order to find a place for itself in participatory culture:

As a consequence we must move from the abstraction of public sphere towards a concept of provisional materializations of transitory public spaces. We must consider how to mobilize a new conception of documentary interfaces to materialize and produce public domains (p. 285).

This idea is particularly powerful for our context; the development of interactive documentaries driven by the dynamics of social media may have the precise effect of ‘producing’ a temporary ‘public domain’ around a particular topic or issue. We can share our participation and interaction from commenting, sharing, liking through to re-editing, uploading content and remixing for sharing in the public convened by the topic.

In a parallel discourse a powerful post-Marxist critique of socially networked mediation has developed. It has grown in persuasiveness as social media have become embedded in everyday life. This critique has taken shape around Terranova’s influential work adapting Negri’s idea of the social factory (2003). This analysis of participatory culture sees the kinds of creative expression afforded by digital as a form of free labour exploited and appropriated for capital accumulation by corporations, brands and advertising. This critique can be identified more recently in the work of Andrejevic (2008, 2009), Bruns (2008), Fuchs (2010) and Hesmondhalgh (2010). This framing of the field is a powerful influence in shaping the debate around the Attention Economy (Goldhaber 1997), which understands that our attention is the commodity that drives the economy of the Internet, not only in the old fashioned way of delivering eyeballs to advertisers in increasingly sophisticated and finely metricised ways (Dovey 2011), but also and, more powerfully, by harnessing the affective pleasures and attachments of online life to create massive capital for a small number of Internet-based businesses (see Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012).

A prototypical instance of this affective economy is the social media site Lockerz targeted at 13–30 year olds; a perfectly honed machine for exploiting young people’s identity experiments. Lockerz bills itself as a ‘social expression reward system’, users are rewarded with points (PTZ) for any actions in the system, watching a video, liking, sharing, tagging, commenting, uploading content and so on. PTZ can then be used for discount in the Lockerz online store or for other discount and group coupon schemes. Lockerz is also a media platform, carrying user contributions as well as its own web series The Homes. Lockerz rise has been one of the commercial hits of the social media economy, having received $43.5 Million of investment (Lunden 2013) with millions of users all over the world. Here ‘expression’, ‘affiliation’ and ‘circulation’ – Jenkins et al.’s characteristics of participatory culture – are aggregated to promote pure consumption; the collaborative force of the user community creates discount markets and shifts product through voluntary and pleasurable teen participation.¹

What I want to attempt in this chapter is to bring to bear the two approaches outlined above in a more detailed engagement with media ecologies. Matt Fuller’s 2005 book is frequently understood as the epicentre of the current wave of interest in Media Ecology:

Ecologists focus more on dynamic systems in which any one part is always multiply connected, acting by virtue of those connections, and always variable, such that it can be regarded as a pattern rather than simply an object (p. 4).

It is clear that the digital documentary, in its online form, exists within a pattern of connectivity, interactivity and relationality. Documentary materials constitute dynamic, mobile, generative experiences as much as they become definitive texts. They can be linked to, liked, forwarded, promoted, posted; they can be re-cut and remade; they can be made from many contributions from all around the world; they can be interacted with in a variety of ways; they can be spatialised and localised, tagged, searched and navigated. The online documentary is contingent, mutable, dynamic: its meanings generated through the user’s interactions with it but also by its own algorithmic interactions with its machinic environment (Elsaesser 2009, p. 183). Echoing the ‘vitalist’ language at the overlap of media ecology and software studies² documentary is alleged to be ‘alive’ in a particular way, Brett Gaylor of the Mozilla Foundation defines their Living Docs project.

‘Living Docs’ are the descendants of classic moving images, but closely resemble software in their structure and approach. Like software, these new documentaries put the user at the center of the experience. Like the best documentaries, they are grounded in real human stories and experiences. … The web offers a shared commons of images and sounds, conversations, and data about our politics, our histories, ourselves. It transforms audiences into active participants. It opens the door for documentaries to become living, changing, and constantly evolving works. (Gaylor 2012)

Sandra Gaudenzi has also considerably developed the idea of the Living Documentary in her PhD research and writes elsewhere of the importance of the active dynamic of relationality in this process:

What actually really matters to me is to see an i-doc as a relational object. What I mean by that is that it is an artefact that demands agency and active participation of some sort from more than one actant and therefore it does not exist as an independent entity – as it is always putting several entities in relation with each other. One of the consequences is that we cannot analyse i-docs using normal film and documentary theory. Speaking of framing, shots, rhythm, editing and intentionality of the author is not enough for this form … as it is ‘something else’. (Gaudenzi 2011)

These statements – and the work they represent – pose profound challenges for the historic documentary studies project. This new work is ‘descended’ from classic moving images but is more like software; ‘Normal film and documentary theory’ will no longer suffice. There are many more detailed interrogations we could enter into here – especially around the continuing roles of film grammar in the micro-fragments of documentary content– however, I want to pursue analysis that takes account of the software that is the infrastructure for the new documentary ecology. As Gaylor observes above, documentarists increasingly need to be software designers too, as the examples of Zeega and GroupStream demonstrate. The ecological framing of this media landscape has all kinds of force. It seems to explain the way that networks constituted by living agents, humans, and non-living agents, software and machines, work together. Additionally, it is a frame that has the advantage of highlighting the digital media domain as a system driven by particular kinds of energy flows, exchanges and mutual dependencies just like a forest or a desert, a savannah or a city.

However, there is an issue for documentary in this framing; ‘Systems thinking’ is very good at explaining networks and their effects; it is less useful to the arts or social sciences when it comes to explaining human experience or dealing with power. What is the ideology of an eco-system? In biological terms it is a meaningless question; an ecosystem seeks its own sustainability. As Zylinska and Kember have recognised in their critique of Fuller:

What we get … is an incessant reiteration of this ‘connectivity’ and ‘relationality’, which through the rhetorical force of his argument is positioned as fact. There is no closer look at what he calls the ‘minor processes of power’ at work … (2012, p. 183).

The closely related field of Software Studies incorporates Media Ecologies understanding of connectivity but attempts to keep power in the analysis, partly by reading code as language. In a powerful early essay from 2001 Alex Galloway explains the twin political dynamics of the concentration of control with the decentralisation of power by reading the Internet as an expression of Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) in which power structures are implemented through the hierarchical protocols that determine web domain names (and by extension all Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that afford ecosystem connectivity):

An analysis of computer protocols proves this for it reassigns the former weapons of Leftists (celebration of difference, attack on essentialism, etc.) as the new tools of Empire … For example, a decentralized network is precisely what gives the Internet Protocol its effectivity as a dominant protocol. Or to take another example, the flimsy, cross-platform nature of HTML is precisely what gives it its power as a protocological standard. Like Empire, if protocol dared to centralize, or dared to hierarchize, or dared to essentialize, it would fail. (Galloway 2001, p. 86)

There is a seductive set of homologies in this account where the twin dynamics of centrifugal and centripetal forces are seen to be at work at the general and local in our social technologies of communication and control. The exhaustive work of Hardt and Negri (2000) anatomises the simultaneous intensification and decentralisation of power which is here paralleled in the contrast between ‘flimsy, cross platform’ connectivity and rigid hierarchical Linnaean taxonomies of control for domain classification. This identification of engineering solutions as the technological correlative of cultural theory might remind New Media historians of previous analyses of what were then called hypertext systems as a kind of technological correlative of poststructuralist literary theory.³ They bot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses
• Part I Expanding Documentary
• Part II Production Practices
• Part III Inter/Action: Rethinking Documentary Engagement
• Index