Digital Media and Documentary at DocAgora by Neil Sieling

I had the pleasure of participating in my first DocAgora session at the
recently concluded HotDocs festival in Toronto. Using their words,
DocAgora is "a non-profit organization working internationally with
documentary festivals to open up a conversation on new forms, new
platforms and new ways of financing creative, authored and
socially-engaged documentary content." To that end, Docagora, in
conjunction with the Center for Social Media, presented a series of
presentations ranging from a keynote address by Ontario College of Arts
and Design, Sara Diamond, the former driving force behind the
influential Banff New Media Institute to a talk by Participatory
Culture/Democracy Player representative Dean Jansen and a panel session
on the compression of time to shorter intervals for documentary
storytelling given the advent of new platforms like broadband delivery
and mobile devices.

My role was as the moderator of an "Oxford Rules" debate whose
proposition was "That Documentary Authorship is a Dead Duck in the
Digital Water." The debate was a lively set of arguments by three people
on each side of the argument. The six debaters had six minutes to
advance their case or to slag the opposition, and culminated in
BBC/Storyville editor Nick Fraser taking full advantage of having the
last word with a blistering sequence that included the clever tactical
ploy of projecting a still image of Canadian icon Marshall McCluhan in
front of a predominantly Canadian audience. The audience had a chance to
clap and register their support for the two positions and the result was
then adjudicated by Rudy Buttingnol, a legendary commissioning editor in
Canada over the years and currently the President and CEO of The
Knowledge Network in Canada.

The overall effect was a useful surfacing of multiple points of view on
authorship and the ascent of audiences and other contributors to a
conception of authorship heretofore dominated by directors and
commissioning editors as the primary drivers. The current moment,
replete with Web 2.0 platforms, collaborative filtering, repurposed game
engines, online 3D metaverses like Second Life, and other
technologically enhanced content creation modes all argue for a more
multidimensional and nuanced conception of the many "authors" in any
given media practice. And so the debate was very much in the social
media focus of The Center for Social Media, and the success of the
debate may well mean future debates at a festival near you.

Sources on the web:

http://www.hotdocs.ca/

http://www.docagora.org/

http://participatoryculture.org/

http://www.getdemocracy.com/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/

http://secondlife.com/