A (Plat)Form between Media - Text 2
The emergence of a technological innovation always brings with it its share of discussion around the best name for it. This act of naming contributes to the innovation’s institutionalization by legitimizing it.[1] This process involves describing how the innovation differs from a medium which pre-existed it. In this sense, the neologism “web documentary” (the single word webdocumentaire in French), sometimes abbreviated to “webdoc,” merging the two pre-existing nouns, has the strength of being obvious.[2] The term “webdoc,” used in particular beginning in 2008,[3] is a fairly literal reference to a documentary whose format has been adapted to online dissemination (fragmentation of the audiovisual content, non-linear narrative, hypermedia nature of the format, etc.), unlike the documentary film (understood as “non-Web”), which is conceived to be projected in a movie theatre or broadcast on television. The term “web documentary” thereby highlights the socio-technical environment of which it is a part. It acknowledges less the fact that, as William Uricchio explains, online users “take charge of constructing their own text out of the materials and context they are given.”[4]
Less used, the expression “interactive documentary” describes this new kind of cultural production by concentrating on the uses to which it is put (this expression is sometimes shortened in English to the term “idoc”). Thus while some interactions are limited to passing from one animated sequence to another, the anticipated involvement brings it closer to serious games or to smartphone applications, as is the case with A Short History of the Highrise (2013). Taking use into account sometimes leads to highlighting the project’s participatory dimension. Indeed in some cases users take part in the creation of online documentary content. In keeping with the principles of the Web 2.0, it is expected of viewers that they will add commentary directly in the interface, but also sometimes fixed or moving images. Man on Bridge (2014), for example, is based on photographs gathered from each user of the site. This store of images leads to populating a database of documentary images for which users have yielded their usage rights. The team responsible for the project is then free to propose different storylines for these visual documents.
