IV: Documentary Practice in an Automated Age

The shift towards "YouTube sized" videos has already primed new media documentary for the automatic age, but there are more adaptations emerging (or that could be imagined) that are beginning with the automatic age. The first principle is that documentary is a process rather than a project. The provocative and journalistic elements of non-fiction film, photography, or sound recording are shot in this spirit, but now with the technology, documentaries really don't have to fit in a two hour box, they don't have to appeal to a wide audience, they can expect an immediate response, and they don't have to end at any given point. Documentaries in the automatic age can be corrected if they are proven wrong, they can been amended (vwiki?) by other media producers, and they can expect respond in video to comments written.

These are just a few of the many exciting possibilities of new media documentary. It all changes the way documentary should be made though. If the search for conclusions was fruitless before, now it is self-defeating. When you start a documentary you start a story, that someone else can end, and perhaps wont end for a very long time. One of my favorite examples of continuous documentary is the "7 UP Series," which documents every seven years of a group of people's lives. This documentary series, lasts as long as their lives, and could conceivably spin off into documentation of their children's lives. Amateur film diary artists were among internet documentary's first innovators, posting videos from their lives weekly. The frequency of the postings enabled by the web encourage obbsession I can recall checking back to see if certain webcams were on or had a new post.

In the automated age, we can rest easy and know when our next chapter has been written and continue the story. But when we enter this age, documentors must practice knowing that their products will be viewed and responded to the audience within a shorter span, leaving less need to explain back stories, and more leaving more room for informalities. Imagine making films for strangers that have a tone of informality that you would only use with close friends, like roommates, because perhaps your audience is as available and in touch with you as a roommate might, in fact, be.

The ability to know something right when it happens is a powerful feeling that consumers of information lust for. As a media maker with this kind of ability you can create products with the seeming spontineity of broadcast medias, the permanence of artifact media and the viral capacity and free-use perameters of new media.