Re-Thinking the Social Documentary

Abstract

This chapter reflects on how people actively engage with interactive documentaries and how this constitutes a shift in audience participation. As a playful format, interactive documentaries invite viewers to also become creative participants. The author makes a convincing case for the civic potential of allowing viewers to play with the documentary film format, foregrounding the interactive documentary as a potent challenger to its traditional, linear, and author-driven counterpart. He speaks in this context of a ‘producerly’ audience that has an active input in the documentary textual interactive system. Uricchio speaks of interactive documentaries as a new media format, that does not so much replace existing, more hieratically structured media formats, but rather can exist alongside them as a participatory alternative.