Rethinking the social documentary

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.

Uricchio, W. (2019) “Rethinking the social documentary”. In: Chap 4 in Glas, R., Lammes, S., de Lange, M., Raessens, J. & de Vries, I. (eds), The Playful Citizen: Civic Engagement in a Mediatized Culture Pp. 73—91, Amsterdam University Press (open access)

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