Documentary & Documentation

In this lecture we look at the broad definition of a documentary and how it has evolved over the last century. The word documentary comes from the word document which can be considered a theoretical construct. "An antelope running wild on the plains of Africa should not be considered a document, she rules. But if it were to be captured, taken to a zoo and made an object of study, it has been made into a document. It has become physical evidence being used by those who study it. Indeed, scholarly articles written about the antelope are secondary documents, since the antelope itself is the primary document." (Buckland 1998).

In film the first ever 'document' was from the Lumiere brothers who pioneered the actuality genre. This simply entailed placing a camera in a statutory position and filming the mundane scenes of everyday life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk&safe=active

What is digital media?

Digital media is the combination of different forms of media content into an encoded digital format. This digital format can be audio, video or photographs that is possible to be read mechanically by a computer. Today we live in the digital era where mobile phones, E-books, CD's, DVD's, video console games like PlayStation and Xbox dominates our world. By far the most significant development has been the internet which has revolutionized every aspect of our lives. It has changed the way we shop, do our banking, the way we access information and the traditional classroom environment with online classes. But perhaps the biggest impact the internet has had has been on the way we communicate. The advent of social media and social networking sites Facebook and Twitter has shifted the emphasis away from traditional news sources to the everyday consumer. The extent to which the internet has irreversibly altered communication for ever was exhibited in the anti-government protests Iran. It was known as the Twitter Revolution because it was the first instance social media, instead of conventional news media became the prime source for informing people of what was happening.

Marshall McLuhan has stated that media “are any technologies that create an extension of human body and senses.” (McLuhan 1964) This shows how that he doesn't prioritize the book to the detriment of others rather he asserts that it is humans themselves who are extensions of the media. He was very optimistic about electronic media because people would no longer be constrained by the book (written way). This type of redistribution led him to making his famous quote “the medium is the message”. His positivity about the future of the media was borne out of his belief that the content was not the message rather the medium was and the scale of change that it introduces to humans. 

Mass protest in Tehran during 2009 post election unrest.