Documentary ecosystems: Collaboration and exploitation

Dovey, Jonathan

Abstract

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.

• Publication Date: Mar 19, 2014
• Deposit Date: Aug 9, 2019
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Pages: 11-32
• Edition: 1
• Book Title: New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses
• Chapter Number: 2
• ISBN: 9781137310484
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137310491_2
• Keywords: open cast mining, cultural memory, documentary film, mapping Main Street, affective attachment
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1980530
• Publisher URL: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137310484