Documentary practice
It refers to what people do with media devices, content, form, and production strategies in order to address the creative, ethical, and conceptual problems and choices that arise as they make documentary films or other similar presentations based on fact or reality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[9] The pursuit of "filmic truth" has been a hallmark of documentary practice since early film-makers such as the Lumiere Brothers, Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov created its foundations.
For example, in June 2006 a 93-minute remake of Pier Paolo Pasolini's documentary entitled Love Meetings (1965), in which he interviewed Italian citizens about their views on sex in postwar Italy, was shot entirely on a cell phone by it:Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi.
They believed that the use of a cellphone, an instrument of daily life, produced an intimacy absent in Pasolini's movie, making people more spontaneous and open, creating a dialogue more like a chat than an interview.
They propose that the line between subject and observer becomes thinner through such practices, as the documentary film-makers present themselves as "normal people" using their cell phones to preserve an instant.
In the same year in India, repeated the victory of the mobile phone's advantages through a documentary film, Veenavaadanam, directed by Sathish Kalathil in Malayalam.
Hooked Up, To Jennifer, Tangerine, 9 Rides, Searching, Unsane, High Flying Bird, I WeirDo are some examples of narrative films, captured by camera phones all over the world.
It explored the possibilities of mobile media devices as a medium for documentary practice by using them to restate Dziga Vertov's perspectives on filmic truth as expressed in his film: Man with a Movie Camera.
It consisted of an extreme long shot of the Empire State Building, held for eight hours in real time, challenging the boundaries of surveillance and watchability.
More recently, scholars such as UCLA cinema professor Steve Mamber, have turned attention to the growing trend of using inexpensive, small cameras to unobtrusively record events of daily life.
For example, the EyeTap, developed by University of Toronto Professor Steve Mann, presents itself as an ideal device for continuous and inconspicuous recording as well as inverse surveillance.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science, in partnership with Amnesty International, presents another example of how new media are allowing surveillance and documentary practices to inform each other.
However, the proliferation of portable media devices that can record and distribute digital images, video, audio and text, combined with the capability to reach previously unreachable audiences via the Web and through vast wireless networks, now makes it possible to transform conventional maps into living documents.
(see External Links) Sonic representations of place, sometimes called "soundmaps," challenge traditional assumptions of what maps can do and offer new ways of participating in documentary practice.
By enabling the integration of sound, text, still and moving images, mapping uniquely allows for more choices of representation and documentation without necessarily privileging one form above the rest.
(see External Links) The emergence of the Geoweb is another example of how changes in the ways people document geographical space is also broadening notions of documentary practice.
On the global scale, access to new media with potential to generate new documentary practices is still confined to an economically privileged few, giving rise to the digital divide.
