Idoc with an “I” as “interactive”

The landscape of the web documentary in 2011 is still very limited. In little more than five years of existence, the « webdoc » has reached an unprecedented interest among photojournalists, new media producers and begins to spread across a wider audience. Yet it is already time to move on, it’s time to move to the ‘idoc.’

At the beginning was the documentary.

The term “web-documentary” originates from the convergence of web technologies with a well-known film genre whose roots go back to the 1920s. In the documentary, a point of view is expressed through a sequential editing of different medium – videos, pictures, sounds and comments. It aims to represent the world in its historical dimension. Traditionally, the documentary can take different kinds of intentions, from a simple catalog of events to the militant or political pamphlet, which remains identified as a representation of reality – that even filtered or curated – differs fundamentally from pure fiction. The American historian and theorist Bill Nichols, explains that documentaries have an intimate connection with world « History » and are driven by an informative logic that supports a vision of this world. The genre is based upon the narrowness of the link which connects the film to the historical reality, rather than a form of artificial narrative which would serve a fictional topic. The documentary is not organized around a main character but around an argument or logic whose roots go back in historical reality. Public expectations are also essential if you wish to define the genre. This is what the viewer perceives the relationship documentary has with reality, proximity and the Director’s POV that will establish with certainty the nature of a film documentary.

Lev Manovich, Professor of Visual Arts at the University of San Diego and new media theorist highlights, in the structure of the Web-based documentary or ‘webdoc’, the predominance of datasets over the narrative itself. Manovich distinguishes the « data », that are used to construct the story (video, audio, graphics, texts, music etc.), and the « narrative », that represents the virtual path linking these data with each other. The main difference between a documentary and webdoc is therefore the access the public has to this database and what it can do with that information. The documentary consists of an extensive collection of content, refined and condensed by the filmmaker into a product for which the video interface (linear by nature) only allows  limited navigation and doesn’t grant access to the peripheral data originally used by the documentary (cut scenes, texts, archives etc.) nor any kind of dynamic intervention by the public. On the other hand, in a webdoc, the public can manipulate randomly – through a sophisticated UI – the data (text, statistics, maps etc.),  navigate through the content and  search for specific information. They are able to select “on the go” items from the story in order to trace a new path in the narrative line which eventually will extend the user experience.

To summarize, the documentary is a finished and frozen product, delivered to an audience (passive group), when the webdoc is a modular and variable object, proposed to the public (active group). Read more