New Documentary Ecologies Emerging Platforms Pract... - (1 Documentary Ecosystems Collaboration and Exploitation)

1
Documentary Ecosystems:
Collaboration and Exploitation
Jon Dovey
Introduction
In this chapter I take the book’s title at face value and examine emer-
gent documentary practices within the ecosystems of the digital media
landscape. Thinking ecologically suggests we look at big pictures, at the
whole assemblage of agents that constitute documentary ecosystems.
This attempt immediately becomes a daunting task. The sheer profusion
of what we might identify as documentary materials is overwhelming.
Documentation and recording of our everyday lives is the superabun-
dant fruit that seeds and sustains the Internet: it is overwhelming.
These fragments of actuality and glimpses into other people’s lives
are everywhere, but they don’t make much sense in a happenstance
browser flow determined by invisible search logics. While we might
derive a powerful sense of affective attachment from our own friends
and followers, few of the posts we encounter on a daily basis add up to
much of a narrative, much less an argument, position or analysis. Yet
Copyright © 2014. Palgrave Macmillan UK. All rights reserved.
the content of the blogosphere, of Facebook, Twitter or Flickr is factual,

journalistic, expressive, everyday – the precise ground of documentary
materials and research. These shards of demotic chatter as public media-
tion are permanently reconfiguring our memory of media form. Wisps
of twentieth century media ‘DNA’ curl through the system conjoining
and mutating into forms of expression that have the memory of film
or music or news or a novel but in reality demand very new forms of
practice in public address, in political economy and in ethics. In this
chapter I set out to investigate one such instance of emergent form, the
‘Living documentary’. The ideas here draw heavily on my collaborators
in the iDocs conference network, the work of Sandra Gaudenzi and in
particular on the work of Mandy Rose, Director of the Digital Cultures
11
New Documentary Ecologies : Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses, edited by K. Nash, et al., Palgrave
Macmillan UK, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gatech/detail.action?docID=1645531.
Created from gatech on 2023-02-09 19:10:18.
12 New Documentary Ecologies
Research Centre at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

Mandy’s work has introduced me to a number of key examples cited
here and her thinking in our two previously co-authored papers under-
pins much of what follows.
Contexts
In attempting a specific, detailed analysis of the relationships between

documentary and the new ecologies of digital media I want to focus on
the twin dynamics of collaboration and exploitation as they are at work
in emerging practices. To understand the rhythm and impact of these
forces I call on three dominant critical frameworks: the culturalist per-
spective that offers generally enthusiastic analysis of the human potential
enacted in online spaces; post-Marxist attempts to understand the ‘politi-
cal economy’ of digital culture; and the media ecologists’ frameworks
that point towards understanding media as living systems.
As a video activist and writer formed through the politics of the 1970s
I begin with a sympathy for those culturalists that emphasise the explo-
sion of human creativity and self-realisation made possible through the
digital. More recently a body of scholarship has developed arguments
that the explosion of ‘vernacular creativity’ (Burgess and Green 2009,
p. 25) made possible by digital has a significant and novel democratic
force. Jenkins et al. (2006) argue that when combined with the new
affordances of collaboration and sharing built into online systems
we can observe the emergence of a new ‘participatory culture’ that is
characterised by: ‘Affiliation’, elective group formation in online com-
munity around enthusiasms, issues or common cultures; ‘Expression’,
music, video, and design tools in the hands of far more users than ever
before and being used for every kind of human mode of communica-
tion; ‘Collaborative Problem-solving’ mobilising collective intelligence,

crowdfunding, online petition making, alternate reality gaming, wiki-
based shared knowledge practices; and ‘Circulations’ playing an active
role in directing media dynamics through the new flows of viral media
driven by Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
This analysis takes popular form where arguments are made that the
new affordances of digital media and social networking are creating: new
modes of capitalism (Tapscott and Williams 2006); transformative modes
of ‘cognitive surplus’ (Shirkey 2010); and new modes of collaborative
innovation (Leadbetter 2008). These emergent modes of participation, it
is argued, develop new kinds of mediated citizenship characterised by ‘the
pursuit of self-organising, reflexive, common purpose among voluntary
Documentary Ecosystems 13
co-subjects, who learn about each other and about the state of play of
their interests though the media’ (Hartley 2010, p. 17). Documentary
has of course always claimed a particular place for itself in the process of
media citizenship, in Nichols’ well known phrase as a ‘discourse of sobri-
ety’ (1991, pp. 3–4) with a privileged address to the state and the citizen.
In an essay published in 2008 documentary theorist Patricia Zimmerman
argued that documentary’s understanding of its public role needed to
adapt in order to find a place for itself in participatory culture:
As a consequence we must move from the abstraction of public

sphere towards a concept of provisional materializations of transitory
public spaces. We must consider how to mobilize a new concep-
tion of documentary interfaces to materialize and produce public
domains (p. 285).
This idea is particularly powerful for our context; the development of

interactive documentaries driven by the dynamics of social media may
have the precise effect of ‘producing’ a temporary ‘public domain’ around
a particular topic or issue. We can share our participation and interaction
from commenting, sharing, liking through to re-editing, uploading con-
tent and remixing for sharing in the public convened by the topic.
In a parallel discourse a powerful post-Marxist critique of socially
networked mediation has developed. It has grown in persuasiveness as
social media have become embedded in everyday life. This critique has
taken shape around Terranova’s influential work adapting Negri’s idea of
the social factory (2003). This analysis of participatory culture sees the
kinds of creative expression afforded by digital as a form of free labour
exploited and appropriated for capital accumulation by corporations,
brands and advertising. This critique can be identified more recently
in the work of Andrejevic (2008, 2009), Bruns (2008), Fuchs (2010) and
Hesmondhalgh (2010). This framing of the field is a powerful influence
in shaping the debate around the Attention Economy (Goldhaber 1997),
which understands that our attention is the commodity that drives the
economy of the Internet, not only in the old fashioned way of deliver-
ing eyeballs to advertisers in increasingly sophisticated and finely met-
ricised ways (Dovey 2011), but also and, more powerfully, by harnessing
the affective pleasures and attachments of online life to create massive
capital for a small number of Internet-based businesses (see Arvidsson
and Colleoni 2012).
A prototypical instance of this affective economy is the social media
site Lockerz targeted at 13–30 year olds; a perfectly honed machine for
exploiting young people’s identity experiments. Lockerz bills itself as a

‘social expression reward system’, users are rewarded with points (PTZ)
for any actions in the system, watching a video, liking, sharing, tagging,
commenting, uploading content and so on. PTZ can then be used for
discount in the Lockerz online store or for other discount and group cou-
pon schemes. Lockerz is also a media platform, carrying user contribu-
tions as well as its own web series The Homes. Lockerz rise has been one
of the commercial hits of the social media economy, having received
$43.5 Million of investment (Lunden 2013) with millions of users all
over the world. Here ‘expression’, ‘affiliation’ and ‘circulation’ – Jenkins
et al.’s characteristics of participatory culture – are aggregated to pro-
mote pure consumption; the collaborative force of the user community
creates discount markets and shifts product through voluntary and
pleasurable teen participation.1
What I want to attempt in this chapter is to bring to bear the two
approaches outlined above in a more detailed engagement with media
ecologies. Matt Fuller’s 2005 book is frequently understood as the epi-
centre of the current wave of interest in Media Ecology:
Ecologists focus more on dynamic systems in which any one part is

always multiply connected, acting by virtue of those connections,
and always variable, such that it can be regarded as a pattern rather
than simply an object (p. 4).
It is clear that the digital documentary, in its online form, exists within
a pattern of connectivity, interactivity and relationality. Documentary
materials constitute dynamic, mobile, generative experiences as much
as they become definitive texts. They can be linked to, liked, forwarded,
promoted, posted; they can be re-cut and remade; they can be made
from many contributions from all around the world; they can be inter-
acted with in a variety of ways; they can be spatialised and localised,
tagged, searched and navigated. The online documentary is contingent,
mutable, dynamic: its meanings generated through the user’s inter-
actions with it but also by its own algorithmic interactions with its
machinic environment (Elsaesser 2009, p. 183). Echoing the ‘vitalist’
language at the overlap of media ecology and software studies2 docu-
mentary is alleged to be ‘alive’ in a particular way, Brett Gaylor of the
Mozilla Foundation defines their Living Docs project.
‘Living Docs’ are the descendants of classic moving images, but closely
resemble software in their structure and approach. Like software,
these new documentaries put the user at the center of the experience.
Like the best documentaries, they are grounded in real human stories
and experiences. … The web offers a shared commons of images and
sounds, conversations, and data about our politics, our histories, our-
selves. It transforms audiences into active participants. It opens the
door for documentaries to become living, changing, and constantly
evolving works. (Gaylor 2012)
Sandra Gaudenzi has also considerably developed the idea of the Living
Documentary in her PhD research and writes elsewhere of the impor-
tance of the active dynamic of relationality in this process:
What actually really matters to me is to see an i-doc as a relational

object. What I mean by that is that it is an artefact that demands
agency and active participation of some sort from more than one
actant and therefore it does not exist as an independent entity – as it
is always putting several entities in relation with each other. One of
the consequences is that we cannot analyse i-docs using normal film
and documentary theory. Speaking of framing, shots, rhythm, edit-
ing and intentionality of the author is not enough for this form …
as it is ‘something else’. (Gaudenzi 2011)
These statements – and the work they represent – pose profound chal-
lenges for the historic documentary studies project. This new work
is ‘descended’ from classic moving images but is more like software;
‘Normal film and documentary theory’ will no longer suffice. There are
many more detailed interrogations we could enter into here – especially
around the continuing roles of film grammar in the micro-fragments
of documentary content– however, I want to pursue analysis that takes
account of the software that is the infrastructure for the new docu-
mentary ecology. As Gaylor observes above, documentarists increas-
ingly need to be software designers too, as the examples of Zeega and
GroupStream demonstrate. The ecological framing of this media land-
scape has all kinds of force. It seems to explain the way that networks
constituted by living agents, humans, and non-living agents, software
and machines, work together. Additionally, it is a frame that has the
advantage of highlighting the digital media domain as a system driven
by particular kinds of energy flows, exchanges and mutual dependen-
cies just like a forest or a desert, a savannah or a city.
However, there is an issue for documentary in this framing; ‘Systems
thinking’ is very good at explaining networks and their effects; it is less
useful to the arts or social sciences when it comes to explaining human

experience or dealing with power. What is the ideology of an eco-
system? In biological terms it is a meaningless question; an ecosystem
seeks its own sustainability. As Zylinska and Kember have recognised in
their critique of Fuller:
What we get … is an incessant reiteration of this ‘connectivity’ and

‘relationality’, which through the rhetorical force of his argument is
positioned as fact. There is no closer look at what he calls the ‘minor
processes of power’ at work … (2012, p. 183).
The closely related field of Software Studies incorporates Media Ecologies

understanding of connectivity but attempts to keep power in the analy-
sis, partly by reading code as language. In a powerful early essay from
2001 Alex Galloway explains the twin political dynamics of the con-
centration of control with the decentralisation of power by reading the
Internet as an expression of Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) in which
power structures are implemented through the hierarchical protocols
that determine web domain names (and by extension all Application
Programming Interfaces (APIs) that afford ecosystem connectivity):
An analysis of computer protocols proves this for it reassigns the for-

mer weapons of Leftists (celebration of difference, attack on essential-
ism, etc.) as the new tools of Empire … For example, a decentralized
network is precisely what gives the Internet Protocol its effectivity as
a dominant protocol. Or to take another example, the flimsy, cross-
platform nature of HTML is precisely what gives it its power as a pro-
tocological standard. Like Empire, if protocol dared to centralize, or
dared to hierarchize, or dared to essentialize, it would fail. (Galloway
2001, p. 86)
There is a seductive set of homologies in this account where the twin

dynamics of centrifugal and centripetal forces are seen to be at work at
the general and local in our social technologies of communication and
control. The exhaustive work of Hardt and Negri (2000) anatomises the
simultaneous intensification and decentralisation of power which is
here paralleled in the contrast between ‘flimsy, cross platform’ connec-
tivity and rigid hierarchical Linnaean taxonomies of control for domain
classification. This identification of engineering solutions as the techno-
logical correlative of cultural theory might remind New Media histori-
ans of previous analyses of what were then called hypertext systems as
a kind of technological correlative of poststructuralist literary theory.3

They both feel to me like readings that veil the material processes they
are describing as much as they illuminate them. They are too conveni-
ent; they elide the embodied experience of using web domains or read-
ing a hypertext. An emphasis on the systemic nature of documentary
in the digital media ecosystem risks losing sight of the documentary
experienced by audiences and the meanings that they make from it.4
However, in so far as protocols are also language forms that set the
terms of engagement, I will return to the idea below in thinking about
how the apparently contradictory processes of fragmentation and aggre-
gation are one and the same dynamic of collaboration and exploitation.
I want to draw from the positions above to suggest an analytic model
that allows us to examine some of specificities of the documentary eco-
system – to develop some tools that give us analytic and critical purchase;
that achieve more than the satisfaction to be derived from the descrip-
tion of the shining system in all its interconnected and networked
promiscuity. I am aiming to show how collaboration and exploitation
are inseparable dynamics of both biological and cultural ecosystems.
Collaboration and exploitation
For the purposes of my model I want to assume that the social media
ecosystem is powered by communication and attention just as the global
ecosystem relies on sunlight and photosynthesis; one presupposes the
other. Communicative enterprises are driven by their tactics for seek-
ing attention; however, communicative acts appear to far outweigh
the attention that can be delivered to them. In the Long Tail no one
can hear you scream. There is, as Goldhaber observed in 1997, far too
much information chasing far too little attention. This is a fundamental
feature of the social media ecosystem that is the habitat of the living
doc. It has consequences that are creating new forms. For instance,
‘crowdsourcing’ content or finance, or deploying ‘user-generated con-
tent’ are not necessarily driven by any desire to open out the production
process but are actually excellent ways to build an audience and to find
a market in the overcrowded conditions of the attention economy.5 In
this reading, having lots of people participate in your project might be
driven less by the desire to democratise the process than the necessity
of finding a critical mass of attention to sustain the project.
Next I want to think about the helix dynamic of collaboration and
extraction that is at work in our ecosystem. These relations of exchange
are easy enough to grasp in ecosystems generally. Although ecosystem
narratives have tended (like Galloway’s protocological control) to

emphasise hierarchical predation as the organising principle of the
human centred pyramid of species, we can just as easily find plenty
of examples where mutual collaboration is at work. The virus is sym-
bolically an organic agent that can be simultaneously damaging and
co-productive. The toxic waste product of one species is the essential
nutrient of another. Ecosystems do not have one measure of value but
many ways of enacting value in a complex web of significance. The
functions of mutuality and exploitation, of co-dependence and co-
constitution are understood as inseparable in biology. Species co-evolve,
the form and function of organisms are mutually dependent and appear
to have evolved together; bees have evolved so that their pollen seeking
activities help to propagate plant life all over the planet (Rose 2005).
However, the post-Marxist analysis of the ecosystem places emphasis
not on collaboration but on exploitation as a model. Value is systemi-
cally abstracted from users’ activities. Indeed the dominant metaphori-
cal landscape of Big Data is entirely extractive, subjects are ‘data mined’,
our data is ‘scraped’ (more like an open cast mining process).6
A political economy of media ecology has two overlapping vectors –
the first is the conventional Dallas Smythe (1981) derived description
of the media as mechanisms for delivering eyeballs to advertisers;
Adsense and targeted Facebook ads return value to Google and Facebook.
Moreover the metrics of user attention made possible online afford finer
and finer grained measurement of user attention. How long do we hover
over a page? What is our click-through rate? Have we ‘shared’ or ‘liked’?
Each one of our interactions can be recorded and given a tiny financial
value to be sold to advertisers.
However, as I have argued elsewhere (Dovey 2011) and Arvidsson and
Colleoni (2012) have shown, the net return through advertising in the
methods above bears no relation to the valuation of online giants like

Facebook or Google. They quote figures suggesting that Facebook returned
just 70 cents in ad revenue from each of its users in 2010 (2012, p. 138).
For most users I would argue this is the acceptable price of free – the
extracted value that costs the user next to nothing and for which in return
they have access to free social networking platforms and powerful search
engines. Free social media clearly affords new dynamics, speeds and net-
worked force to collaboration and cooperation.
Instead of the traditional political economy of media value proposi-
tion, Arvidsson and Colleoni (2012) develop a different mode of value
creation that they argue is another form of ‘affective labour’. In this
analysis, users’ affective attachments, pleasures, sense of belonging,
shared humour, taste culture, histories and memories, all constitute

affective engagements with sites and with brands. The force of these
affective attachments is measured in the stock market valuation
of companies. The affective investments we make in ‘affiliating’,
‘expressing’ and ‘circulating’ information and media create attachments
to attention-rich digital brands that actually become capital investment
despite the enormous discrepancies between earned income and market
value.
The new documentary ecology is taking form in a landscape char-
acterised by the particular dynamics of the attention economy, and
by the need to create engagement with the media products that this
economy creates. Participation is driven by the necessity of attention
aggregation as much as by any desire or need to open up or democratise
production processes. This landscape shapes the necessarily intertwined
processes of collaboration and extraction in social media, fragmentation
and aggregation of media content and decentralisation and control of
power.
Co-creative ecosystems
I now want to turn to examples of documentary practices to make some

observations about the way these dynamics are at play. Traditional
documentary practices are mutating through their deployment of
newly available collaborative potential. Conventional film making and
journalistic practices are adapting to the potentials of participation and
changing, though not destroying, the forms and the address to the audi-
ence of documentary. We can observe the speed and connectivity of dig-
ital collaboration at work in all the stages of production. Funding can be
crowdsourced from, for instance, IndieGoGo or Kickstarter. Research can
be conducted collaboratively in an online global network. Distribution

can mobilise user communities in new ways. The documentarist Robert
Greenwald (Outfoxed (2004); Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price (2005))
has, for instance, refashioned his production company Brave New Films
around participatory dynamics; audiences are encouraged to set up local
screenings of the films for free precisely in order to convene a temporary
or contingent public space for debate and co-creation. The company’s
online social networks are also used to fundraise for future productions,
to distribute work in short form instalments and to encourage remix-
ing (Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013, p. 169). In the United Kingdom
the British Film Institute have used Jeanie Finlay’s 2001 Film Sound it
Out as an example of the impact of collaboration and co-creation on
documentary production (Hodgson 2012).7 Ten thousand dollars of

initial funding for the film was raised via IndieGoGo. However, and this
a crucial feature of my understanding of these new dynamics of collabo-
ration, this crowdsourcing process produced more value than just the
initial $10,000; like the people in the Brave New Films community, the
Sound it Out network produced a public, a network with a stake in the
film. Of course, at the same time as these benefits were being built in the
network, film screenings were returning income through the usual box
office means to the producers.
In the examples above the film content itself is conventional, linear
documentary production, however, the dynamics of collaboration and
exploitation are at work in the process of producing publics, commu-
nities of interest and action. At the same time attention and money
is returning to the producers. Here the dynamics of collaboration and
exploitation begin to shape new kinds of public space; micro-networks
of solidarity, education and intervention that are unconcerned with
large scale mass media methods and that prefer to mobilise publics at
a local level and build audiences in a gradual and painstaking process.
In the mainstream we have seen similar dynamics in operation. The
BBC’s series Virtual Revolution (2010), for instance, ‘crowdsourced’ the
research phase of the project; themes, ideas and contacts were shared by
an open online community with Director Alex Krotoski, via the BBC’s
extensive online presence. The shows themselves were then written,
produced and directed in the usual way. In journalism The Guardian
has become one of the biggest global online news providers through
embracing the dynamics of collaboration. One of its chief spokesper-
sons is the journalist Paul Lewis who led The Guardian / London School
of Economics project ‘Reading the Riots’, an analysis of the riots that
broke out all over the United Kingdom in the summer of 2010. Lewis’s
account of the project begins with him heading up to Tottenham High

Road in North London in pursuit of the rumour of riots – en route
he sent a Tweet asking for any information from people at the scene,
where was the riot? What could they see? From this simple opening
he built a network of collaborators, observers, correspondents, subjects
and citizen journalists, all of whom could connect quickly and easily
with Lewis and The Guardian. The usual dynamics of collaboration
(eyewitness statements, interviews, information and opinion gather-
ing) became a collective expressive process curated and orchestrated by
the journalist. The explosive events were very fast moving and ubiqui-
tous; the state was unable to respond as police and surveillance were
constantly behind the curve of social media. The press and television
were equally unable to picture the totality of what was occurring. In

this scenario Lewis’s method of collaborative reportage was produced
by the events themselves (Reading the Riots 2011). Like the example of
Sound it Out above, Lewis was able to follow through on the collabora-
tive dynamic by recruiting members of his correspondents network to
conduct the interviews that became the data in the ‘Reading the Riots’
research project.
The new patterns of collaboration in the examples above show that
the potential and ease of collaboration exists at every level of produc-
tion, funding, research, design, content production, editing, marketing
and production; all these can be accomplished by strangers in remote
locations working for money, or for passion, hope and social enter-
prise. This new ecosystem is supported by multiple variations of the
gift economy, where the mutuality of exchange creates the value that
makes the system itself coherent and meaningful. The value it produces
for its participants may be understood as reputational, affective, in
skills development or sharing cultural capital; it may be economically
effective, politically mobilising, sexual, creative, subversive or deviant.
What matters is that there is enough value reciprocation in that particu-
lar subsystem to flow effectively for the time it takes to complete the
exchange necessary to the task in hand. Reciprocation builds through
many other scales of communication and language where valuing prac-
tices are enacted by communities of interest.
However, we should not assume that because mutuality and collabo-
ration are characteristic of this milieu that its enactive relationships are
always lateral, horizontal or equal. We have noted above that extraction
exists as an equally important force in the networked media online
space. Here value is concentrated in small nodes that play a coordinat-
ing, publishing and exploitation role in new media production. Life
in a Day (Ridley Scott and Kevin McDonald 2011) is the paradigmatic

example of this tendency at work in documentary. All the YouTube
participants were invited to contribute their ‘day in the life’ footage;
the invitation to contribute your footage for free to be cut by someone else
with no editorial rights is a very minimal collaboration. While a limited
reputational value might accrue to contributors whose work was chosen,
the greatest value accrues to the filmmakers through the usual box office
returns.8 This ability to turn ‘affective labour’, brand identification and
media buzz, into hard cash is at the heart of Arvidsson and Colleoni’s
(2012) account of online political economy above. YouTube’s partnership
with Ridley Scott and Kevin McDonald on Life in a Day seems to me a
comparable operation. In the period after YouTube’s takeover by Google
for $1.65bn in 2006 speculation was rife about how Google would make
money from its acquisition. YouTube, after all, had not actually turned
an operating profit up to that point. While the intensification of adver-
tising and partnership arrangements are one obvious sign of Google’s
attempts to capitalise on the attention commanded by YouTube we
might understand a partnership with Ridley Scott, Kevin McDonald
and Sundance as another. Life in a Day produces reputational and brand
value for YouTube, no longer the domain of ‘lolcat’ videos but of serious
collaborative filmmaking. The possible readings and meanings of Life in
a Day are entirely consistent with its brand-led production history. It is a
vacuous and superficial essay in ‘one world’ humanism; its compilation
of human behaviours is devoid of argument, analysis, or narrative. Life
in a Day tells us that human beings are glorious, complex, suffering, and
joyous creatures – it is the twenty-first century’s version of a Coca Cola
or United Colours of Benetton advertisement.
Framing ethics
One important tactic for negotiating this tension between collaboration

and extraction occurs in the practice that Mandy Rose and I have ana-
lysed elsewhere as ‘framing’ (Dovey and Rose 2013, p. 19). This refers to
the process through which collaboration and participation is invited in
the first place. What are the terms of engagement? What is the contract
(implicit or explicit) between content contributor and content com-
piler? What are the terms of exchange? Who retains rights in the work?
Is it commons licensed or IP protected? These are all questions that
call for a new set of ethical and legal protocols for participatory culture
where the terms of collaboration and exploitation are made as explicit
and transparent as possible.
However, framing is also a key narrative and design decision. Here

I am thinking about how the invitation to participate is framed, how
does the invitation position the contributor? In web design terms getting
‘the call to action’ right is an important part of user experience design; if
a site depends on a certain level of participation for its success then the
proposition, the call to action, is crucial. Getting it right may also require
testing and iteration before hitting on the most effective formula. In
the case of participatory documentary, framing the call to action can also
be an action that positions the project in some wider social, political or
cultural framework. The positions that the framing implies are genera-
tive of the ‘new conception of documentary interfaces to materialise and
produce public domains’ called for by Zimmerman (2008).
I first wrote about the idea of ‘framing’ in relation to the BBC’s Video
Nation series of the 1990s (Dovey 2000, pp. 121–132). Co-founded and
produced by Mandy Rose, Video Nation (1994–2000) can now be under-
stood as a seminal TV intervention, developing the idea of a participa-
tory documentary practice and underpinning her current research. Video
Nation was a series of two-minute self-produced camcorder fragments
broadcast in primetime as interventions into the schedule on terrestrial
BBC2 television. These fragments were made by a range of correspond-
ents recruited by the BBC’s Community Programmes Unit. The point of
revisiting this example here is that the call to action was framed in such
a way as to establish a shared, public, address. The idea of nationhood
inscribed in the framing is of difference rather than homogeneity. The
demographic of the contributors attempted to reflect the actual demo-
graphic make-up of the United Kingdom; the producers call to action,
their participant recruitment pack stated, ‘minorities are over represented
in order to ensure on-screen variety’. On-screen variety here becomes a
way of mounting a long running argument with the idea of the nation
state as something defined by homogeneity and exclusion not difference
and inclusion. The framing invites public dialogue. Participants are asked
to collaborate in a process through which meaning will be generated from
their work being critically positioned in relation to the idea of ‘Nation’.9
Union Docs Mapping Main Street (2009) is another project that frames its
call to action in such a way that the collaboration generates critical public
dialogue rather than just extraction. Mapping Main Street was initiated in
response to the 2009 Presidential campaign in which the ‘people of Main
Street’ were constantly evoked by politicians to stand for some particular
version of mainstream United States; the producers set up a site that asked
people to make a short film about their own Main Street. The result is an
on-going collection of short films that collectively tell us there’s no such
thing as the typical Main Street imagined by politicians; we live lives that
are specific, local and different rather than invisibly homogenous. Jesse
Shapins (of Union Docs and Zeega) articulates the role of the producer
in these projects as ‘leading and designing frameworks that do have very
specific constraints and that have very specific thematic and geographic
focuses that then create a context for many different voices to come in’
(in Dovey and Rose 2013a, p. 19). The framing of the call to action fre-
quently suggests constraint as a generative move that produces materials
that try to enact new kinds of dialogic public speech.
Frequently this is achieved by offering a frame that has a kind of built-
in counter argument to dominant public narratives. The proposition for
participants and users is that by answering the call to action they will
become part of a public, making critical educational or observational

content available. However, the ‘call to action’ has exactly the same ethi-
cal fissures as the documentary film researchers’ pitch to potential film
subjects, ‘Come and be in our film because it will … (a) help make the
world better by getting stories like yours heard so that the situation can
change; (b) make your life better because your voice will be heard; (c) cre-
ate a profile for yourself that will reward you in some way; (d) contribute
to the public good by making your experience or knowledge a learning
resource for other people’. These ethical contradictions have not disap-
peared through the rapid proliferation of participatory media opportuni-
ties; they have in fact multiplied and ramified in their complexity.
At the very least documentary producers (or convenors and curators as
perhaps they might be called), need to develop some transparent codes
of ethics for participants. First of all who owns the rights to material con-
tributed? Under what kind of licensing arrangements are they available
and to whom? How do participants get credited? Is there any possible set
of arrangements whereby participants can share in the rewards accruing
to producers? Importantly, the idea of reward or benefit has to encompass
non-financial reward, such as reputation, trust, profile, or Klout score.
Framing the project and its call to action is then an important strat-
egy for setting an implicitly critical address to the audience as well as,
potentially, a way to address some of the ethical problems that arise
through the conjoined dynamics of collaboration and exploitation in
content production. Can the ‘call to action’ be explicit about the terms
of exchange in the co-creative enterprise?
Documentary data
We now turn to a final section considering participatory documentary’s

relationship to data. This is an agenda for future documentary research

that will have to understand all mediation as part of the cloud driven
by ‘Big Data’. This idea itself is a product of the interplay between the
dynamics of collaboration and exploitation:
In the Cloud ecology, in fact, both capital and multitude take on roles
as host and parasite: the networked body of the social, the multitude,
feeds off the monstrous body of capital while it, in turn, is nourished
by that very body of the collective. (Coley and Lockwood 2011, p. 52)
The value proposition of ‘Big Data’ is that the data that we all produce inces-
santly and excessively through our online lives can be economically and
socially exploited for profit and cohesion. The traces of our collabora-
tive participations will produce new sources of social and market value.
Galloway argued this point in 2001:
Foucault defines the former [bio-politics] as ‘the endeavor, begun

in the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems presented to
governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of
living human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation,
birthrate, longevity, race’ (1997, 73). Thus, we can assume that the
whole mess of biometrics and statistical analysis (from the Bertillon
identification system, to the Social Security Act of 1935, to the tabu-
lation of birthrates by the Children’s Defense Fund) all fall under
the category of biopolitics. … Biopolitics, then, connects to a certain
statistical knowledge about populations. It is a species-knowledge.
(Galloway 2001, p. 86)
In fact documentary has a long relationship with data understood

both as content (in films), and as part of biopower’s discursive strate-
gies. One of the strategies of documentary evidence in its argument
has been its use of statistics. It is a commonplace of expositional and
current affairs documentary that a particular instance of behaviour
should be contextualised by statistical evidence that puts it into a
wider context or makes it representational of some bigger story. The
documentary form emerged alongside other ‘discourses of sobriety’
intimately related to the development of statistics, ‘numbers’ objec-
tified society, thereby furnishing the epistemological ‘conditions of
possibility’ for the emergence of the modern state and bureaucratic
power’ (Crook and O’Hara 2011, p. 3). Later when the first newsreels
were produced as ‘actualities’ in the early years of the twentieth cen-
tury they also co-constituted this sphere of public opinion. It was the
‘creative treatment’ of these ‘actualities’ that Grierson proposed as the
first definition of documentary.
While this is a broad ranging and complex set of relationships, this
analysis is underpinned by Andrejevic’s useful distinction between ‘user
created content and user created data’: ‘It is the latter category that might
be construed as being extracted under terms derived from ownership of
the means of (‘immaterial’) production’ (Andrejevic 2009, p. 418). The
intertwined nature of the collaboration/extraction dynamic that I have
been addressing can at least be partly disentangled by understanding
how voluntary provision of content and the frequently involuntary pro-
vision of data go hand in hand.
However, data in current documentary practice also carries another set

of meanings, metadata, tags and search terms, which are derived from
navigation (of databases). This new importance of semantic data for the
documentary producer bleeds into practices of participation as producers
begin to establish collaborative database systems for documentary aggre-
gation. For instance Mapping Main Street (see earlier) could be understood
as constituting an online database of Main Street content. Producers,
including Union Docs, have gone further in automating the process of
collaboration by creating different kinds of software systems that invite
collaborative content. HTML5 has unlocked the potential for collaboration
to be automated. This is important because it suggests ways that collabo-
ration and extraction can be scaled. If we can develop systems that make
user-generated content machine readable then all kinds of meaning and
value producing aggregation operations can be performed on it. Instead
of a jumble of related content the framing or call to action might require
participants to provide content tagged with a choice of particular key-
words, alleviating the need for expensive human moderation, editing and
aggregation. HTML5 has created the possibility for the text attachments of
video content to become far more ‘machine readable’ and interconnected.
Brett Gaylor’s (2012) intimation that documentaries become like
software is literally being played out as, for instance, Union Docs trans-
mute into Zeega,10 from public media producers to software developers.
Zeega is a system for sequencing content and pulling in media from
anywhere in the web. The team behind 18 Days in Egypt followed a simi-
lar route; beginning as a project to make a film using the social media
generated in Tahrir Square in 2011 the team in fact finished up working
on GroupStream, software that allows multiperspectival journalism.
The two developments are emblematic of documentary developments
where content producers and curators work with software developers
and interaction designers to make online documentary.

However, the more interesting question is how we might begin to
formulate a set of critical questions about database design. The pro-
cess through which cultural memory, history and human know-how
becomes subject to the logics of algorithm and search engine might be
understood as a typical example of Stiegler’s idea of ‘grammatization’:
Grammatization is the history of the exteriorization of memory in all its

forms: nervous and cerebral memory, corporeal and muscular memory,
biogenetic memory. When technologically exteriorized memory can
become the object of sociopolitical and biopolitical controls through
the economic investments of social organizations (Stiegler 2010, p. 33).
For Stiegler this process of ‘grammatization’ is to be understood as a

debilitating feature of contemporary techno-capitalism in which our
ability to live, our ‘savoir faire’, is undermined and ‘consumers … are
henceforth deprived of memory and knowledge by the service indus-
tries and their apparatuses’ (Stiegler 2010, p. 35). If we understand
18 Days in Egypt and The Austin Music Map as new ways of ‘grammatiz-
ing’ cultural memory then the problem becomes how we make content
with transparent protocols of exchange, criticality and public dialogue.
Such transparent protocols for contribution again require a kind of eth-
ics of design and software. We have a great deal of work yet to do to
understand that databases themselves are not just neutral machines but
are constituted through particular value systems and limit or afford user
actions. This work will require the documentarist to understand further
the software developer and experience designer in order to understand
the ways in which metadata and search begin to be a core part of the
editorial process rather than a post-production add on. The way a user
discovers content, the navigational pathways they follow, will consti-
tute the documentary experience.
The relationship between documentary and data can be summarised
as having three primary meanings. These emergent reformations of doc-
umentary’s relationship to data are a function of the bigger landscape
shaping its emergent ecosystems. First, the semantic data of tagging,
attaching the right words to the right fields in your video aggregating
software so that both machines and humans can find it.11 Second, docu-
mentary may continue to use data as content, this may take the tradi-
tional form of statistics used as evidential support or increasingly take
the form of data visualisation.12 Third, participatory documentary will
produce data – about its user community – for the platforms that house
its content, such as YouTube, Google, Facebook, Vimeo, Daily Motion.
This is what I have called ‘involuntary’ immaterial labour described by

Andrejevic above. In ecological terms this data is the biomass of the
Cloud, created by every interaction and constituting a kind of richly
productive fertile layer from which web native businesses create value.
The political question here is what rights and responsibilities do we
have for the ‘biomass’ that we produce?
Documentary co-creation and economies of contribution
The rapid expansion of participatory culture is an on-going chal-

lenge: communities grow faster than their capacity to socialize their
norms and expectations, and this accelerated scale makes it hard to
maintain the intimacy and coherence of earlier forms of a participa-

tory culture. Members are tempted on all sides to embrace practices
which don’t necessarily align with their own interests: and yes partic-
ipation often involves some degree of imbrication into commercial
logics. (Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013, p. 175)
In writing on technology and cultural form in the context of contempo-

rary media we are always in a transitional phase. Our media landscape
is a function of permanent upgrade culture where there is no ‘other
side’ where it all stops changing, just as there is no ‘outside’ the cultural
networks and power relations that ‘emplace’ us. This means that while
new formations arise others maintain and mutate but rarely disappear.
Documentary Cinema is thriving. Factual Television continues to com-
mand markets.
The emergent ecosystem that I have been describing occupies a com-
paratively small part of the media landscape. However, it is a terrain
full of invention, innovation and energy. I have tried to demonstrate
how processes of collaboration in documentary production are co-
constituted with processes of extraction, aggregation and exploitation.
The task for documentarists is to negotiate our terms of engagement
with our collaborators, participants, contributors and users; we have to
find ways of establishing protocols of engagement that maintain a vis-
ible public and a critical mode of address. These protocols may be tech-
nical in terms of, for instance, database or interface design, they may
be legal in terms of ethical and contractual arrangements, or they may be
political, educational or commercial terms of engagement. Unlike soft-
ware protocols, APIs, they are likely to be negotiated on a case by case
basis.
The praxis of documentary has always demanded ethical protocols
for dealing with contributors to protect them against the exploitation

of the value appropriated by filmmakers in the production process. Now
the documentary has to extend and radically reformulate these proto-
cols to forge the terms of an ‘economy of contribution’ (Stiegler 2010,
pp. 127–129) for the specificities of its cultural practice in Coley and
Lockwood’s (2011) ‘Cloud ecology’.
The development of these terms could begin with further research
aimed at an explicit articulation of the kinds of value exchange driving the
dynamics of collaboration described above. Co-creators might, for instance,
be seeking common group membership, a repertoire of affiliations to like
minds with all the identity and social benefits it brings. Contributors might
be seeking to make action in the world, to do something together, to create
impact of all kinds, including social justice; they might be interested in

preserving cultural memory together, ‘we did this, we witnessed, we were
there’. Co-creators’ rewards might be found in the enhancement of their
reputation and trust, through the production, for instance, of portfolio
pieces for their future careers or creative expression, or the enhancement
of their online profiles in ways that produce cultural capital for themselves.
Contributors could be offered a financial stake in any distribution income
from collectively co-authored work or an economic share of the benefits
accruing from their own ‘affective labour’. Of course all of these types
of value overlap they are frequently experienced as part of a generalised
participatory disposition. Moreover, they are relational values, enacted
through the interactions of the agents in any given production network
rather than encoded in ‘quasi legal’ frameworks. Doubtless the list above
could be added to by empirical investigation, and will grow as new inno-
vations take root. What is important about the values being generated
in this economy of contribution is that they are made explicit, that they
are shared. Where such values are shared documentary can continue to
fulfil its role to produce publics equipped to have agency in our shared
worlds.
Notes
1. Andrejevic makes a similar point in relation to the way that television fans’
collaboration may ‘be a site of community and personal satisfaction and one
of economic exploitation’ (2008, p. 42).
2. See, for example, Lash (2006).
3. See, for example, Landow (1992).
4. Indeed there has been no substantial research at all into the reception of
iDocs or the kinds of experiences that they are able to promote and sustain;
it is a field led by technological affordance rather than audience demand.
5. Or to put it another way to ‘materialize or produce a public domain’ as
Zimmerman notes (2008).

6. The metaphorical declaration of war on the knowledge ecology apparent in
these extractive metaphors should not be lost on us.
7. The film was a study of the last record store in Teesside, in the north east of
England; the film is a love letter to vinyl, a portrait of a group of people for
whom the record shop is a cherished but threatened site in their cultural and
personal biographies.
8. I have written elsewhere (Dovey 2011) about the value of the online drama
Kate Modern in helping to boost the price of the teen online social network
Bebo, sold to AOL for $800m in 2008 and folding two years later.
9. We can see something like this occurring on a global scale in the epic The
Global Lives Project (2010). This US production set out to document 24 hours
in the lives of 10 people representing human life on earth. In stark contrast
to the purely extractive logic of Scott and MacDonald’s Life in a Day the
framing of The Global Lives Project itself makes a critical statement. The pro-
ducers set out to accurately reflect global demographics in the film’s subjects
so that six out of the ten are Asian, for example, five urban, five rural, half
earn between $2 and $9 dollars a day, there is an equal gender split and an
accurate reflection of the global distribution of religious faith. This framing
is hardly radical but in the dominant context of one world humanism the
emphasis on the rural poor as an accurate reflection of humanity itself con-
stitutes at least the start of a critical framing. The terms of the collaboration
assumes a critical public dialogue.
10. Available at: http://zeega.com/
11. In a system like Florian Thalhofer’s Korsakow software this metadata produc-
tion becomes an editorial function determining the quality of the user expe-
rience. In other applications it might also be understood as a function of
‘grammatization’ (Stiegler 2010 p. 33) as it determines what kind of archives
might be available to users in the future.
12. Mandy Rose and I have written elsewhere (2013b) on Jonathan Harris’s We
Feel Fine as a work at the interface of documentary practice and data visu-
alisation. ‘The best works are those where the aesthetics help people under-
stand the data, where they are almost telling a story’ (Diamond 2010, p. 11).
Here the sentiment mining is entirely involuntary but also anonymous, so
neither jeopardy nor reward could accrue to the originators of the phrases
aggregated by Harris’s engine.
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the content of the blogosphere, of Facebook, Twitter or Flickr is factual,

Research Centre at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

In attempting a specific, detailed analysis of the relationships between

tion; ‘Collaborative Problem-solving’ mobilising collective intelligence,

As a consequence we must move from the abstraction of public

This idea is particularly powerful for our context; the development of

exploiting young people’s identity experiments. Lockerz bills itself as a

Ecologists focus more on dynamic systems in which any one part is

What actually really matters to me is to see an i-doc as a relational

useful to the arts or social sciences when it comes to explaining human

What we get … is an incessant reiteration of this ‘connectivity’ and

The closely related field of Software Studies incorporates Media Ecologies

An analysis of computer protocols proves this for it reassigns the for-

There is a seductive set of homologies in this account where the twin

a kind of technological correlative of poststructuralist literary theory.3

Collaboration and exploitation

narratives have tended (like Galloway’s protocological control) to

methods above bears no relation to the valuation of online giants like

shared humour, taste culture, histories and memories, all constitute

I now want to turn to examples of documentary practices to make some

be conducted collaboratively in an online global network. Distribution

documentary production (Hodgson 2012).7 Ten thousand dollars of

account of the project begins with him heading up to Tottenham High

were equally unable to picture the totality of what was occurring. In

in a Day (Ridley Scott and Kevin McDonald 2011) is the paradigmatic

One important tactic for negotiating this tension between collaboration

However, framing is also a key narrative and design decision. Here

become part of a public, making critical educational or observational

We now turn to a final section considering participatory documentary’s

relationship to data. This is an agenda for future documentary research

Foucault defines the former [bio-politics] as ‘the endeavor, begun

In fact documentary has a long relationship with data understood

However, data in current documentary practice also carries another set

and interaction designers to make online documentary.

Grammatization is the history of the exteriorization of memory in all its

For Stiegler this process of ‘grammatization’ is to be understood as a

This is what I have called ‘involuntary’ immaterial labour described by

Documentary co-creation and economies of contribution

The rapid expansion of participatory culture is an on-going chal-

maintain the intimacy and coherence of earlier forms of a participa-

In writing on technology and cultural form in the context of contempo-

for dealing with contributors to protect them against the exploitation

impact of all kinds, including social justice; they might be interested in

Zimmerman notes (2008).

Burgess, J. and Green, J. (2009) YouTube (Cambridge: Polity Press).

Dovey, J. and Rose, M. (2013a) ‘This Great Mapping Of Ourselves – New

Landow, G. (1992) Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and

Shirkey, C. (2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

Film & Webography

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