Clicking on the World: Documentary Representation and Interactivity

Click here to start your journey, React! Add your comment, Upload a photo, add your story, explore the 360-degree simulation, what will you do? While we think of film and television documentary audiences as engaged in the act of watching and interpreting documentary texts, emerging forms of documentary created for computers, tablets, phones and iTV seem to engage the audience in profoundly different ways. No longer merely spectators, audiences are invited (compelled?) to engage in a range of practices, from choosing content, navigating an environment or posting a comment, to becoming part of a community engaged in collaborative forms of production. These diverse actions are collectively described as forms of interaction, a concept that is becoming increasingly significant for documentary scholarship. Interactivity is often identified as the characteristic that distinguishes emerging forms of documentary from film and television, changing not only modes of engagement, but the form of the text itself. But what is interactivity and what are the implications of interacting with documentary as opposed to other media forms?