Siobhan OFlynn, PhD

Canadian Studies, University of Toronto

CFC Media Lab, MaRS
siobhanoflynn.com
Making Public(s): Web 2.0 documentaries and social activism

As we all know, the shift to digital, web-based documentaries means more than a
structural change in design from linear, authored film to non-linear interactive
experience, as the affordances of Web 2.0 platforms are now impacting everything from
how content is generated to ethical questions that arise in the positioning of participatory
documentaries as community hubs. Increasingly, in creating narrative frameworks for
participatory, interactive docs directors and producers act as deliberate catalysts for social
activism. And while this has often been a goal of traditional documentaries with the
foregrounding of directorial voices and presences such as Michael Moore or Morgan
Spurlock calling for reform in industry and/or government, the opportunity for an
immediate dialogue and exchange with and between a global audience via Web 2.0
platforms is unprecedented. The tension and continuum that I want to open up today
exists in the interplay between two established forms of web-documentary, and a third
form or trend which I would argue is a co-opting of what we do on the web everyday
when we search, if we think of the net as a documentary medium.
First, I want to map what I have been aware of as an evolution of form in web doc
as a frame to discussing where we are now [how communication via Web 2.0 platforms is
impacting both digital documentary practices and the possibilities and implications for
social activism within this sphere]. I also want to acknowledge that there will likely be
projects that complicate this mapping but I will hang on to it as provisional as though I
am comfortable in chaos a little bit of structure now and then is reassuring as it helps me
situate our projects. I also want to raise the potential & challenges to social activism that
Web 2.0 platforms and collaborations make possible. Im going to outline some of the
projects Faisal Anwar & I are currently working on that are working with these questions
in various ways.
The first mode, closest to traditional documentary are the controlled experiences
designed to tell a story which cede editorial control in greater & lesser degrees to the
participant. Im going to presume some familiarity with the examples Im going to
mention so in the interest of time I wont go into great detail. In what I think of as the
first wave of web docs, various content elements in a narrative are accessed via a series
of choices that might be designed as a controlled temporal sequence, more closely
aligning to cinema as in Journey to the End of Coal (which has minimal interactivity)
or looking way back to Seven Sons, a web-doc built with the Korsakow software, an
associational structure moving from element to element via a predetermined algorithm.
The archival structure of these works function as databases where the site design creates
variant modes of access to a limited data set. And as with all interactive narrative
projects, designers decide how much control to retain over the narrative flow, how much
choice to give to the user and to what degree interactivity affects the progression of the
narrative. Within this context it is key though that these web docs are structured to tell a
coherent organized story involving human protagonists in what can be charted as a plot.
Errol Morris Standard Operating Procedure could also be grouped here as it is tells
the story of participants in Abu Ghraib but does so through the spatial organization of
multiple modes of accessing the content. Arte TVs Gaza/Sderot, and the recent SXSW
winner in the Activism category, The Tiziano Project: 360 Kurdistan also work with
multiple stories organized around specific communities and geographic locations. In all
of these, short segments (video, image sequences, text, audio are experienced as coherent
units building towards a cohesive and limited narrative.
A further database variation focuses on a specific topic. The NFBs Waterlife
doesnt offer stories of individuals rather information aggregated around the topic. I want
to also note that these examples also mark a progression in increasingly sophisticated
interface and user experience design. Waterlife in particular demonstrates an integrity of
design coherence where all aspects of the sites design extend & support the subject,
water, evident in the interfaces fluid transitions between various modes of accessing
content. In 2010 I participated in a panel judging best web documentary for MIPDoc and
a key differentiator in the projects we looked at was innovation in user experience design
building on the affordances of the web as a medium, rather than simply using a branching
tree structure to make a linear film interactive. And for this reason we chose Gaza/Sderot
rather than Journey to the End of Coal. This is a brief nod to user experience as there isnt
enough time to address this further today. Let me acknowledge that rich field and move
on!
The second distinctive form weve seen take off recently is that of the
crowdsourced documentary, also termed participatory or collaborative doc. And if my
teaching in interactive narrative design used to foreground critical decisions re. control &
choice, I have since added three more cs, create, contribute and collaborate. Im sure
were all familiar with Life in A Day, 2010, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott, directed
by Kevin Macdonald and shot by participants from all over the globe. Or the One Day on
Earth Project which invited video submissions shot on October 10, 2010. Or the New
York Times A Moment in Time interactive photo doc compiling photos taken last year
at the exact same moment on Sunday May 2. Each of these latter three examples marks a
progressive and incremental shift away from directorial control integral to traditional doc
to the curatorial presence of the director/producer who creates a conceptual frame which
is the catalyst for invited submissions. These three maintain aspects of the traditional role
of the director/producer in that he/she is the final editor of content and is presumably
involved in the design of the website and user experience. I want to pull out one more
parallel here, in that each of the first three has a limited time-line for submission which
allows for the equivalent of a final directors cut as in Life in a Day which screened at
Sundance. We are seeing an enormous global interest in participating in these projects. In
the case of The Life in a Day project received over 80,000 submissions from 197
countries, over 4,600 hours of video all shot on July 24, 2010. Let's also note that
crowdfunding for documentary projects via Kickstarter or stand-alone websites has also
become an important means for documentary filmmakers to create community and
galvanize social activism on given concerns by reaching out and creating a fan
community long before a film is even in production.
A further variant on crowdsourcing, which I would term indirect or uninvited
collaboration is found in Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvars, We Feel Fine, which pulls
content from blogs based on code or tag words parsing emotional states which are
represented in a continuously streaming data visualization. Their project is framed as
anthropological in inquiry, documentary in form, and global in scope, providing a portrait
of shifts in the planetary emotional register which are represented in what they call its
continuously self-organizing particle system. Here too, the designers define the
thematic frame of the project, its organizational structure and the distinct styles of
interface that represent various modes of parsing and accessing content. An important
distinction around collaboration exists though between projects which invite submission
of thematically specific content and the harvesting (Harris word) of data from blogs in
We Feel Fine. We could argue that We Feel Fine continues the documentary tradition of
organizing and framing found archival content, yet a further distinction is that the project
is ongoing and continues to pull content directly from the web, meaning that the data set
is ever expanding. One effect of this data mining is that each encounter with the project is
unique, fleeting and transitory. In all of these examples, however, we can still see what
John Grierson termed the creative treatment of actuality. And let me add that the implicit
assumption is treatment by someone, the filmmaker or now the designer
The third form of web-doc which is ubiquitous in the digital sphere is the
experience of the internet as a documentary platform, and I would raise the question of
how close and how far this is from from the curatorial framing and data aggregation
found in Harris and Kamvars We Feel Fine, leaving aside the enormous importance of
the visualization. On the one hand this is so self-evident I wondered if there was anything
useful or insightful to say. What I am particularly interested in however is the
phenomenon of mass documentation of significant events via web and social media
platforms, and how the sharing of this content intentionally speaks to and articulates an
awareness of an emergent shared digital public sphere that exists in response to a given
event. Anyone watching the ongoing revolutions of the Arab Spring via multiple
simultaneous platforms has likely had this experience of entering into a documentary-in
the-making and I would like to consider this phenomenon in terms of what Arjun
Appadurai theorized as a strategy of grassroots globalization. In an essay from 2000
Appadurai argues that a series of social forms has emerged to contest, interrogate, and
reverse [the negative impact of globalization] and to create forms of knowledge transfer
and social mobilization that proceed independently of the actions of corporate capital and
the nation-state system (and its international affiliates and guarantors). One effect of the
scale of the documentation of these recent events is in the words of Mohamed El Rashidy
that the visibility of recent uprisings has made a global audience and world leaders
mindful of the Arab street in contrast to the status quo negotiations between nation
states.
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The question emerging for me is how the documentarian will function in this
space of mass real-time documentation on the web. And when we individually create
experiences that are very closely aligned to what Harris and Kamvar have structured any
time we search the web, for Bhenghazi for example, or Cairo, how does this differ from
the authored web doc? or how close is it? . Clearly the volume of content highlights the
need for curation and targeted inquiry, and an intentional designing of narrative flow and
user experience which is the art in this space. It may be that the value of the web
documentarian is as as the creator of a thematically or conceptually focused search
algorithm that aggregates and organizes increasingly large and expanding data sets in a
way that can be meaningfully parsed. Add to this the distinction of a unique, playful, and
innovative interface design and you have We Feel Fine.
I want to touch on two other examples in this context before I turn to the projects
Faisal & I are working on. In the G20 summit June 2010 in Toronto, mass
documentation of the three day events contributed to the galvanization of a public outcry
demanding an inquiry into policing practices which involved kettling, mass arrests, and
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http://www.cbc.ca/hereandnowtoronto/episodes/2011/03/23/tahrir-in-toronto-tracking-a-revolution/
the use of tear gas & rubber bullets on Torontos streets. The public documentation via
image and video often referred directly to the need to bear witness to events to support
future inquiries into the unexpectedly brutal practices of the police. During the events, the
real-time streaming of content on the web and on dedicated twitter streams via hashtags
became the primary source of information and content for a concerned citizenry and for
news broadcasters. And for those like myself who watched these events via multiple
platforms, this collaborative documentary streamed and was archived simultaneously in
real-time on the web. This digital archive has since led to charges against specific police
officers and to a damning report by Ontarios Ombudsman who credited the content
shared via social media as integral to the conclusions of the report: Andre Marin: To my
knowledge, this is the first time that any ombudsman investigation has used social media,
and I can attest that it has been a very useful tool. And while the CBC just screened a
documentary on the G20 called You Should Have Stayed At Home where the key
footage was taken by the public, this documentary is enframed by the larger collaborative
digital archive shared through social media platforms and dedicated websites.
The final example I want to consider is the recent addition of the Participation
component to the NFB/Kat Cizek multi-media documentary project High Rise Out My
Window which pulls crowdsourced photos uploaded to the Out My Window flickr page
and displays them within a 360 setting much like the interactive documentary shorts. The
inclusion of a participatory component extends the curatorial frame to include a
collaborative global community. In one sense it shifts the project to a more diffused and
expanded sphere of experience whereas the original collection of 13 stories presented in
Out My Window focused on a marked critique of the social injustice experienced by
many living in these vertical suburbs.
[the last section of the talk was not pre-written. I discussed projects by my partner, Faisal
Anwar [mycitystories.com] and a current project we are working on.]
Partial Bibliography
[more will be added for the formal published version]
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
-----. Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination. Public Culture 12:1
(2000): 1-19. Web. 16 Oct. 2010.
Foster, Hal. The Artist as Ethnographer. The Return of the Real: The Avant- Garde at
the End of the Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. 302-309.
Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.
Wood, Denis. Lynch Debord: About Two Psychogeographies. Cartographica 45:3
(2010): 185-200. Web. 7 Nov. 2010.