Polar Inertia

You may remember that on Friday we were discussing Paul Virilio's book Polar Inertia - in connection with the analogy between the history of street lighting and that of closed-circuit video surveillance in cities. Here's the image from the book's cover which I also mentioned:

Telepresence/new media vehicles

Here's the iRobot site I was talking about in class on Friday, and Erik Davis's astonishing Wired article (8.09, September 2000) about it.

Anyone who attended Lev Manovich's lecture at the New Museum the other day will probably now understand my question about new media as the design of new vehicles...

It's also interesting that the iRobot people describe their AIBO-like webcam as a "physical avatar" (an avatar is usually defined as a graphic representation of the self in a virtual environment).

Home Page clips

Here are the Quicktime clips from Home Page which I showed in class last week, plus one I didn't have time to show:

* Looking for Bobo (Carl Steadman)
* Coming Home (Marjorie Block)
* Discovering Difference (Carl Steadman)

A reminder that Lev Manovich will be signing copies of The Language of New Media this evening at the New Museum of Contemporary Art on Broadway (south of Houston) at 6. If you haven't already picked up a copy of the book, this is a good chance to do so and get the author's autograph!

By now you should have set up your personal weblog on Blogger - if you haven't done this, please do so as soon as possible. If you've been having problems and were unable to do so, please let me know by email before class tomorrow.

You should also and received, and accepted, an invitation to join the communal weblog for the class. Use this as a sort of asynchronous chatroom, for posting announcements and/or annotated links to sites/page relating to the class.

Some of you have been asking about the content of posts on your personal weblog. A reminder that you're required to post at least one question or comment about the assigned reading or online materials by midnight Thursday before a given class (i.e. at midnight today). This is meant to serve as a basis for class discussion the following day. For this reason, on Friday before class, try to take a look at what other people in the group have posted on their blogs (links to all class blogs will be on the zone page).

In terms of the content of "response" posts, try to be concise - remember that yours will be only one of about a dozen other posts people will be looking at. Don't worry about saying the "right thing" - your goal should be simply to raise something which you think it would be interesting and/or worthwhile discussing in class. To this extent, it's useful to think of your post in terms of a specific CLAIM you're making about the materials, a QUESTION you'd like to raise to them, or a FOLLOW-UP to a point someone else has made, either online or in class (for this reason it's important to be attentive not just to me but to what other people in class are saying!)

In your posts, be specific about the context you're referring to and make your claim/question/followup as focused as possible - avoid vague, generalized, or over-subjective posts. If you're making a claim, in particular, give reasons for how you arrived at it, and think about how you'd support it if challenged (examples, etc.) Referencing texts we're reading the class can be a useful starting-point for discussion (use short quotations or give page numbers).

In the case of this week's topics, here are a few questions to get you started. I'm especially interested to hear what you made of Justin Hall, the main character of Doug Block's film Home Page, as well as of the blogs of Meg, Jason and any of the other links. How would you characterize the various positions of the different people in the film vis-a-vis new media technologies and their potential/threat? How does what Justin or Meg are doing relate to older media/cultural practices (diaries, home movies, photo collections, the fridge door). How are new media and communications technologies impacting social relations, our sense of personal identity, our experience of time and space? What are the ethical issues raised by posting personal histories in the public domain of the web?

I'll be evaluating the quality of posts by their success in generating productive discussion of and reflection on the course materials. Claims and questions will be evaluated by their insight/sophistication, followups by their responsiveness to comments by other group members.

Last week, I also asked for feedback about the project of videotaping part of the class - we'll be discussing this at the beginning of class tomorrow, but in the meantime I'd welcome any comments or suggestions on this weblog for how we can make best use of this resource for the class.

Hope these guidelines help - feel free to ask for more details about any of the above points in class tomorrow.

Interactive Documentary (3916)
Summer 2001
New School University
Media Studies Program

Course instructor: Dr. Martin Roberts
Class meetings: Fridays 3-6 p.m. (June 8-July 13)
Class location: KU (55 West 13th Street): 804
Office hrs.: by appointment
mroberts4@nyc.rr.com

Course Description

Documentary has historically been associated with the media of photography, cinema, television, and video. Over the past decade, however, digital media technologies have led to the emergence of new forms of documentary in the interactive realm of CD-ROM, the Internet, and the Web. While these forms commonly include photographs or video, they also differ from older forms of documentary in significant respects: they are non-linear, event-based, and offer new possibilities for participation in the production process itself.

This course provides an introduction to these new forms of interactive documentary, and considers what happens to historical genres of documentary (political, ethnographic, cinema verite, etc.) when they enter the world of digital, networked media. Topics addressed include: personal web pages as a continuation of popular self-documentary practices such as family photograph albums and home movies; web diaries and travel narrative; testimonial sites organized around historical events; uses of the web to document and mobilize support for ongoing political struggles; webcams (networked videocameras) and their relation to verite and reality-TV; and recent attempts to document cyberspace itself. Taking neither a utopian nor a reactionary approach to its subject, the course considers the possibilities offered by interactive media for the future of documentary.

Assignments: Reading

REQUIRED: Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2001.

RECOMMENDED: Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. Rev. ed. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Most reading assignments for the course will be web-based. Some photocopied articles will be distributed. Recommended background texts are listed in the bibliography below.

Assignments: Writing

1. Weblog response and other posts (min. 10)
* Create a personal weblog (week 1) on Blogger site.
* Post 1 response weekly on this no later than Thursday at midnight each week.
* Min. 1 other post weekly required.

2. Site report/review (oral/written: 15 mins/1000 words)
* Choose one web documentary site from the approved list (or propose another - must be preapproved).
* Study site and give 15 min presentation of/commentary on it to the class.
* Post review on personal weblog (due on day of presentation).

3. Research report (oral, group: 30 mins)
* Conduct additional research in a group of 2-3 and report orally to class on this.
* Post annotated links on class weblog (zone1, zone 2, etc.) created for this purpose.

4. Analysis paper (1000 words), due 7/6/01
* Write a review-essay on an approved topic in Lev Manovich's book The Language of New Media, paying particular attention to how it relates to the question of interactive documentary.

Grading and Evaluation

Weblog: 20%
Site report: 20%
Research report: 20%
Analysis paper: 20%
Class participation: 20%

---

Agenda

[X] = xerox

06/08/01 Introduction

* Personal documentary
* Screening of Doug Block’s Home Page [VHS]
* See also: Doug Block; Justin Hall; Carl Steadman; Julie Petersen; Howard Rheingold; Suck

06/15/01 Public Secrets (1)

* Rebecca Mead, "You’ve Got Blog", New Yorker 13 Nov 2000: 102, 104, 106-08
* Meg; megnut cam; Jason; the "infamous" bathroom mirror picture; also, check out the Mirror Project itself
* See also (optional): Ev; EvLover (aka The Pyra Shrine); Beebo.org (community weblog); Metafilter; Medianews; Arts & Letters Daily
* Web diaries: LiveJournal; Diaryland

06/22/01 Public Secrets (2)

* Charles Platt, Steaming Video," Wired, 8.11 (Nov 2000).
* Aparna Kumar, "He Said, She Said, Web Dread," Wired News, 23 Feb 2001.
* Jennicam
* Carlazone
* AnaCam
* CameraPlanet
* See also: Earthcam; Leonard's Cam World; Yahoo Webcams.

06/29/01 In Memoriam

* Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust [CD-ROM]
* Visual History Foundation: Survivors of the Shoah
* Other sites tba

07/06/01 Counter-Publics

* Boyle, "From Portapak to Camcorder: A Brief History of Guerrilla Television" [X]
* Independent Media Center
* Guest: Matt Kohn, Election

07/13/01 Kino-Eye

* Manovich, The Language of New Media
* Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera [DVD]
* Mann, "Cyborg Seeks Community" (Technology Review, May-June 1999.
*** DEADLINE: review-essay of The Language of New Media ***

07/14/01 Classes end

---

Select Bibliography

Barnouw, Erik. 1983. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. Rev. ed. Oxford University Press.
Barsam, Richard Meran. 1992. Non-Fiction Film: A Critical History. Rev. ed. Indiana University Press.
Boyle, Deirdre. "From Portapak to Camcorder: A Brief History of Guerrilla Television."
FEED Special Issue: Documentary
Jacobs, Lewis. 1987. The Documentary Tradition. Rev. ed. Norton.
Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality. Indiana University Press.
———. 1994. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Indiana University Press.
Renov, Michael, ed. 1993. Theorizing Documentary. Routledge.

Films

Doug Block, Home Page
Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera
Startup.com (currently playing at Film Forum)

Resources

Documentary Sites

* DocuWeb
* Journal E
* Neon Sky
* Picture Projects
* prelinger.com

Specific Projects

* 360degrees: Perspectives on the U.S. Criminal Justice System
* aka Kurdistan
* Re: Vietnam: Stories Since the War
* Gilles Peress, Farewell to Bosnia
* Hong Kong '97: Lives in Transition
* Emiko Omori, Rabbit in the Moon
* Payphone Project
* Barbara London, dot.jp
* Barbara London, Stir-Fry: A Video Curator's Dispatches from China
* Barbara London, InterNyet: A Video Curator's Dispatches from Russia and the Ukraine
* witness.org
* Whoseland
* Harappa
* The Mirror Project

Other Recommended Sites

* Dogme95
* Rhizome
* Plastic
* MarketMap

---

Below is an archive of online lectures (1-8) from Interactive Documentary (Spring 2000) course.

1: Actuality

Here are a few sites I'd like you to look at to get things started:

* Lev Manovich's Little Movies project (Apple's QuickTime plug-in required).

* From Today. A conference on electronically-mediated documentary work, recently held at Brown University 15-17 March 2000. This should give you a good idea of the current developing interest in interactive documentary. The "Resources" item alone should keep you busy for a few days! We'll be looking at a number of the sites listed here later in the course, including "Beyond The Viewfinder" and POV's "Vietnam: Stories Since the War," so have a look at these if you'd like a sneak preview of what's coming up. Other sites worth checking out include the online photography webzine Untitled and the bizarre Payphone Project.

* Optional: If you're interested in a quick introduction to the subject of documentary, have a look at FEED magazine's recent Special Issue on the subject, especially Kio Stark's overview of the history of documentary, "I, Spy".

The idea for this course first came to me a year or two ago, when it struck me how similar today's QuickTime movies are to the actualité films of the Lumière Brothers almost exactly a century ago, and which mark the earliest beginnings of motion pictures and what a century later we've come to know as "cinema".

The more I thought about it, the more the similarities and differences between the two became interesting: the extreme constraints of the medium itself and the limitations it placed on content (the short length of the Lumière films, the bandwidth limitations on QuickTime movies); the fact that each media technology was considered the state of the art in its day, yet by subsequent standards was incredibly primitive; and above all, the whole concept of the actualité itself.

For the actualités were documentaries. As the film historians have pointed out, the earliest forms of film weren't fiction films of the kind we're familiar with today, but documentaries--documentary preceded narrative fiction in the history of cinema.

The term actualité itself is interesting. In French, actuel means "current" or "present"; actuellement doesn't mean "actually" in the English sense, but "right now". The actualités, then, recorded what was going on right now--or right then--in front of the camera. They became a way of recording a fragment of the actual, of something actually existing, in the ontological sense, at the time the camera was rolling--regardless of the separate question of whether it was "real" or "staged". They thus became a way of storing something that had actually happened, once, and which could be replayed any number of times afterwards: a document. Collectively, these visual documents would come to be known as a form called documentary. In its earliest forms, documentary is the art of the actual: a train arriving in a provincial station, a bustling city street, a baby being fed.

In the early years after the Lumière Brothers' first films, their employees travelled all over the world, bringing back actualités films which provided an experience of "virtual tourism," simulated visits to exotic locations, and changed forever people's understanding of "the world". (With the other modern media, it led to the emergence of something which could be called a global imaginary.) Many of these and other actuality films, by the way, are collected on a recent videotape and DVD called Lumière et Compagnie. As you watch the DVD version of the Lumières' first films on a computer screen, it's interesting to think about the implications. Lev Manovich's "Little Movies" series is also an interesting attempt to get us thinking about the relationship between analog and digital cinema.

It's interesting to compare these actualité films with the live, global images of contemporary webcams, and how these images too are contributing to a sense--perhaps an imaginary one also--of the "global village," in McLuhan's celebrated term. The concept of actuality is quite relevant in connection with these webcam images, which record in real time an actuality somewhere else on the planet.

Thinking about the relationship between actuality films and QuickTime movies or webcams, though, is only the beginning of the much larger question of the relationship between documentary and interactive media. A lot has happened in the history of documentary since the actualité films, clearly. Two main lines of questioning emerge:

* How are digital, networked, interactive media changing the nature of documentary as a historical cultural form? What new possibilities do they offer for it?

* How are the many historical varieties of documentary, from the actualité films through ethnographic documentary, political documentary, and other forms, continuing to inflect work in contemporary digital media? What are the continuities between analog and digital, as well as the discontinuities?

These are two of the key questions we'll be trying to work through in the coming weeks. What I'd like to lay out here for reflection and discussion are a few parameters for thinking about how new media (a term I dislike, but it's shorter than saying digital, networked, etc...!) are changing what we mean by the term "documentary". I've added a comment or two on each, to give a clearer idea of what I have in mind.

Documents and Evidence
A documentary in the cinematographic sense today is typically a collection of other media documents--press clippings, photographs, official documents, etc.--presented as evidence in connection with an argument intended to inspire the viewer to some sort of action.

What new possibilities does the interactive domain offer for the presentation of these and other documents?

Time and Duration
How does time work in (a) documentary? What period of time is documented, and how does this relate to the time of the documentary itself? Again, what new possibilities for the duration of a documentary are offered by a medium such as the web?

Genre and Format
What are the specific counterparts of historical forms of documentary (ethnographic, cinema vérité, etc.) in interactive media?

Individual vs. Collective Narrative
Historically, film documentary has tended to originate with one individual, or at most a small group. How do interactive media provide an opportunity for telling collective, multiple stories?

History and Memory
What is the role of documentary in the construction of memory, whether individual or collective? How do interactive media enhance this process, or limit it?

The Notion of an Event
A documentary is often related to a specific event of some kind, but the experience of that event which documentary offers is usually after the event itself (if I shoot an interview with someone, for example, that interview only appears later when I screen my film).

How do interactive media change all this, by collapsing the time difference between the subject of a documentary and its actual production?

Map, Index, Archive
What new ways do interactive media offer for organizing, indexing, archiving, and accessing documentary information? How does this change the form in which this information is presented?

***

To answer questions such as these, you'll need to have a deeper historical understanding of documentary itself. If you've taken Deirdre Boyle's documentary courses on campus, you'll be able to help us out a lot in the coming weeks. (I've invited Deirdre herself to visit the course later in the semester.) If not, the best place to start is with one of the recommended texts, Erik Barnouw's book Documentary. Each week, I'll be attempting to supply some of the historical background which will help to put some of the examples we'll be looking at in their larger context. A couple of words, to conclude, about some of the choices underlying the course.

Online vs. offline media
One of the main questions in choosing materials was the relationship between networked and stand-alone media (e.g. CD-ROM). This distinction is becoming increasingly blurred as increasing numbers of DVDs are produced which interface seamlessly with the web, combining dynamic content with digital video stored locally, and hence avoiding slow downloads of video files.

Although many of the CD-ROMs and the smaller number of DVDs produced to date have documentary content, for practical reasons I decided to focus exclusively on web-based documentary work. This was partly because CD-ROMs are quite expensive (they often seem to come with equally expensive coffee-table books), but mainly because there are more than enough materials to be covered in an 8-week course on the web alone.

Individual and Collective
In terms of the course structure, the overall trajectory is from the individual to the collective: we start out by looking at forms of interactive documentary in which, as in older forms, the primary subject of the documentary is an individual and her/his experience. Increasingly as the course progresses, however, the focus shifts towards documentary as a collective project, regardless of its different goals. This shift, it seems to me, is one of the most important aspects of how networked, interactive media are changing the nature of documentary, and will become an increasingly important issue as we move through the course.

This should hopefully give you some things to think about and discuss over the next couple of weeks.

2: Snapshots: Personal Memory

Me and Rebecca playing with friends in the kitchen. My parents still have that wallpaper.--Plant City, FL, 1975.
 
For this week's topic, start out by taking a look around Stuart Tiros's personal site. (Warning: photos in the section titled "Private" contain nudity.)

Then--and only then--read this press release.

And when you're done with that, you can move on to Steven Shaviro's article "Through A Monitor, Darkly: William Scarborough's Prosthetic."

Steven Shaviro teaches in the English Department at University of Washington and is the author of The Cinematic Body (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993).

***

"I have a homepage, therefore I exist." -- Steven Shaviro  

One of the problems with studies of documentary until recently is that they have tended to focus primarily if not exclusively on professional documentary production, whether in photography, film, or video.

While this privileging of professionalism has its uses, it has also skewed the history of documentary by ignoring popular documentary practices, which often make use of the same media (photography, film, video) as the professional producers. The popular here is often closely tied to the personal, as ordinary families and individuals document the events and rituals of their daily lives (vacations, weddings, children) with photography, 8 mm and Super8 film, and more recently, the camcorder.

The reasons for the exclusion of popular documentary practices are partly aesthetic, partly ideological. On the one hand, popular documentary forms have been excluded on aesthetic grounds, because they often fall short of professional standards of media production. The very emphasis on the personal has also provided grounds for a more ideological exclusion, the assumption being that in order to be considered significant, works must move beyond the strictly personal sphere and address more universal themes and issues.

Yet popular documentary practices are arguably as historically rich and revealing as more professionally-produced records of their time. In particular, it could be claimed, they reveal that the personal is never "just" the personal but is always entangled in, and revelatory of, larger historical processes--political, social, economic, etc.

This in part explains the growing scholarly interest in recent decades in popular media forms like home movies, or formats like 8 mm film. I'm thinking in particular here of the work of Karen Ishizuka and others, on home movies made by Japanese-Americans in U.S. internment camps during WWII, and which has led in part to recent documentaries on the subject such as POV's "Rabbit in the Moon." This is just one example of how personal histories are intertwined with political ones.

The popularization of the Internet, and especially the Web, have created not just a new medium but a new distribution platform for personal documentary practices. The family album, or the family home movie archive, can now be put on the web for family members increasingly scattered far and wide around the globe, or for anyone else interested in looking. A new range of networked appliances, like digital picture frames, are beginning to emerge to facilitate this process.

The genre of choice in this new medium to date has been the personal web page. Homepages have sometimes been compared to the fridge door of the family kitchen, which in many homes is elaborated decorated with family snapshots, children's drawings, and other snippets of information (next time you're in the kitchen, take a look at your fridge door and imagine how it might look as a web page--in fact, it might even be an interesting web project to make an online exhibition of fridge door photographs. If you think I'm being silly, try typing "virtual fridge" into your favourite search engine.)

There are now literally thousands of personal homepages available on the web. See, for example, Yahoo's Directory. As Steven Shaviro has observed, for many having your own homepage seems to function as a way of proving your existence to the world. Some people have even turned themselves into online celebrities (or become so more or less by accident) via their websites.

As you'll see, personal pages are often grouped according to nationality or ethnic identity, but they often belong to virtual communities, as with AOL's Hometown. Extended online families establish networks on the basis of shared names, identities, experiences, link to each other's sites, and may even arrange to meet in person. Much of the discussion of virtual communities to date has centered on single relationships, gender-switching, sex, etc., but it's easily overlooked that families are increasingly staking a claim to the web too, and creating a virtual home accessible to members who may live far away from the real one. The web is thus playing a sometimes strange and complex role in changing people's relationship to home.

In a world where people are increasingly using the web not just to document their lives but to broadcast it as well, it was perhaps inevitable that the personal webpage itself would become a subject for parody, as with William Scarborough's Prosthetic project. But as the price of digital video production hardware and software continue to fall, and home movies are replaced by digital home cinema, the future may be something which might be called The Family Channel, offering digital movies of weddings, new babies, and vacations, live streaming video links with family members all over the world, and so on.

As with analog media, the production values of these popular digital documentaries may fall short of professional standards, but for the historians of the future they will certainly provide a fascinating record of everyday life in the early digital age.

3: Tourists With Laptops

[Required sites are marked below by an asterisk (*). All others are optional but recommended.]

This week we'll be focusing on online travel diaries as a genre of interactive documentary. One place to start is Barbara London's diary on the MOMA site of her visit to *Japan (there are additional sites for her visits to Russia and the Ukraine and China).

Those interested in adventure tourism may like NOVA's current project, *Shackleton's Antarctic Odyssey.

The Features section of the National Geographic site includes a number of travel diaries, one of the most interesting being *Outpost: Congo Trek (check out the nifty map viewer!).

Lastly, Yahoo's travelogues page has links to many travel diaries of the "follow Chris and Tina on their round-the-world tour!" variety. See also the virtual field trips links.

***

Last week we looked at personal homepages as a particular form of popular, autobiographical documentary. The term "homepage is interesting here, given that in many cases home--the domestic sphere of the family, is the focus of the homepage itself.

This week we keep our focus on the individual, but turn our attention outwards, to the documenting of experiences when people leave home and travel out into the world. Travellers of all kinds have long recorded their experiences in writing, of course, from the travel narratives of global historical explorers to today's booming travel-writing industry. While in the age of printing, writing and graphic images of various kinds (illustrations, paintings, maps) were the primary source of travel media, in the modern age they've been joined by photography, film, video, and most recently digital media as resources for documenting travel experiences (we should also not forget that popular hybrid of image and text, the postcard). These forms have not so much superseded as supplemented one another, each new one adding to the repertoire of available resources for documenting travel experiences.

The web is a case in point, but arguably differs from earlier forms of travel media in that it brings together and virtualizes all the preceding forms in the space of the page or site, incorporating narrative, 2-D or 3-D graphics, and still or moving images. (The National Geographic site Outpost: Congo Trek is a good example of this.)

So what are we to make of this virtualization of travel media on the web today, and of specific travel genres such as the travel diary? Do we conclude that they're simply the latest, hi-tech version of popular practices which have been going on for centuries, and leave it at that? If not, what other significant aspects are worth considering?

Immediacy/Instantaneity
Perhaps the most obvious difference between older forms of travel documentary and web-based ones relates to time and space. Take the postcard. Typically written and sent to friends and relatives, the postcard is entirely dependent on the vagaries of the mail system, which if it involves international travel, as it often does, can be highly unreliable. As everyone knows from experience, the first question you ask family and friends after returning from vacation is: "Did your postcard arrive yet?" Often, the answer is an embarrassing "no"... Holiday photographs meet a similar fate (except for Polaroids, I guess): again, there's a time-lag of at least a few days, but more often a few weeks, between production and reception. The travel diary, while usually written on the fly as travel itself unfolds, has to be written up afterwards. If it's being published in a newspaper, magazine, or book, there may again be a significant time-delay between the act of writing and its reading by others.

In the age of laptops, digital cameras, and satellite uplinks, all this changes: in theory, if not always in practice, digital media and telecommunications collapse the time-lag between experience and the reporting/documenting of it almost to the point of the instantaneous. If you look closely at travel-diary websites, indeed, the goal appears to be, as far as is technologically possible, to reduce to a minimum the spatio-temporal distance between the traveller's and the viewer's experience: thiat is, to document and relay experience in real time, as it happens. Today, anyone--and the point, of course, is that "anyone" is a long way from "everyone"--with a laptop, digital camera, and wireless modem can become a one-(wo)man film studio, not only producing but also distributing documentary materials almost in real time.

Personal Broadcasting
Another difference between web-based and older forms of popular documentary relates to audience. Traditional forms of popular documentary--postcards, holiday snapshots, home movies--were all confined primarily to the domestic sphere of family and friends. Digital media technologies, however, offer the possibility of reaching a much wider, and potentially global audience--what might be called personal broadcasting. So whereas with traditional travel media, there is a distinction between popular and professional forms of travel documentary, in terms of distribution and audience, with today's interactive media that distinction is at least potentially effaced: anyone can potentially become a documentary producer (albeit not necessarily a good one, of course!).

One may legitimately ask why anyone would want to put their holiday photos or travel diary on the web. When people are uploading their mini travel documentaries, don't they ever stop to wonder why anyone who doesn't know them should be remotely interested in their travels? This is an interesting question, but it may be beside the point. It seems that this function of the web--the possibility for personal broadcasting--is what's most appealing: the idea that potentially, anyone might be interested in looking at the site is what matters most. It's almost as if the fact of publicly documenting one's experiences validates a sense of social self-worth (a similar argument could be made about personal homepages). Anyway, this is something which I hope we can discuss further.

Objectives
Lastly, it's worth reflecting on the different objectives or goals of traditional and interactive travel media. Again, with forms of popular documentary like postcards, holiday snaps, and home movies, the primary object of the exercise seems to be that of creating a kind of family history, an archive of documents which, with repeated viewings over the years, become repositories of family memories and mythology (incidentally, Walter Benjamin is deeply critical of the role of photography in limiting memory in this way, but that's another story...). Again, in an age where personal broadcasting is possible, this changes. One obvious function it can serve, as with established network channels such as the Discovery Channel, is as entertainment, of course. Another change is in the pedagogical direction: travel diaries can serve as an educational tool as schoolchildren can follow a space shuttle mission as it unfolds, or learn about other societies and cultures around the globe by following the itinerary of someone producing a web diary of their travel experiences.

Popular/Corporate
Perhaps the most important point not to lose sight of, though, relates to my earlier point about "anyone" vs. "everyone". The fact is that in spite of the much-vaunted democratization of media production heralded by cheap computers and digital cameras, relatively speaking, only a very few people today have the possibility of being able to produce their own interactive, global travel documentary. The prohibitive costs of global travel and hardware means that in practice, projects such as those we're considering this week still remain primarily within the professional rather than the popular domain, and require the financial support of corporate media institutions (MOMA,NOVA, National Geographic). If the figure of the "hacker tourist" has become one of the contemporary heroes of WIRED magazine, then, for the time being most of us will have to continue to rely on postcards, Polaroids, and palmcorders.

4: Being There: Webcams

This week we're looking at the use of webcams as a form of (almost) live, real-time documentary.

Some of you may already have heard of the best-known examples, Jennicam, a kind of ongoing, online reality soap which when it was first launched a year or two back made its central protagonist an internet celebrity.

The other main example we'll be looking at this week is Steve Mann, inventor of the Wearable Wireless Webcam and founder of a veritable subculture of cam-wearing cyborgs (you may need to register to access this article on the New York Times site).

The best place to start here is Mann's recent article in MIT's Technology Review, "Cyborg Seeks Community". Don't miss the link to the collection of links at the bottom of the page on Steve's projects and wearable computing in general.

For an overview of the proliferating cam culture, see Earthcam, Leonard's Cam World, or Yahoo's Webcams.

***

This week I'd like to depart from the pattern of previous weeks, by posting a shorter, less narrative-based introduction to the topic, and suggesting more lines of inquiry and possible future discussion which we might be interested in discussing over the next 2 weeks.

I'll assume that you've taken at least a preliminary look at the Jennicam and Steve Mann materials assigned this week, although I'd like you to continue to explore them (there's a lot just on wearable webcams and wearable computing in general).

Let's start with context: where, in relation to the history of documentary, might we situate something like Jennicam or Steve Mann's Wearable Wireless Webcam?

In the case of Jennicam, first of all, that context is what might be called the cinema verite tradition and what documentary theorist Bill Nichols might see as its bastard offspring, such as "reality soaps" like MTV's The Real World or COPS, not forgetting recent films like The Truman Show and Ed-TV.

Nichols sees the verite tradition as having been perverted by the appropriation of verite techniques and methodology (Jean Rouch/Edgar Morin's Chronicle of a Summer being usually considered as the founding example of the genre) purely for entertainment purposes in today's so-called reality-TV programming or the use of verite style in drama series like NYPD Blue.

Jennicam also recalls the early 1970s "fly on the wall" documentaries produced in the US (the Loud family) and Europe (the BBC series The Family), with a couple of important differences: first, those series were produced by professional TV crews for broadcast, whereas Jennicam is self-produced and uses the web as a personal broadcasting channel; secondly, as with earlier documentaries, there was a time-lag between the actual shooting of the 70s documentaries and their editing and broadcasting, whereas with Jennicam it's as if the verite movie is being shown (almost) live, as it happens.

This (almost) real-time nature of the image brings up the related questions of voyeurism and surveillance (a big focus of concern in Steve Mann's work), except that since the source of either voyeurism or surveillance is Jenni herself, it might be more appropriate to speak of exhibitionism (arguably, voyeurism and exhibitionism are two sides of the same coin anyway).

In the case of Steve Mann, I propose that we begin by discussing the parallels and differences with Dziga Vertov's figure of the "man with a movie camera", immortalized in his 1929 documentary of the same name, whose central character is of course based on Vertov himself.

The still from Vertov's film, of the cameraman looking through the camera viewfinder on the cover of Barnouw's book, looks strikingly similar to images of Mann's webcam on his homepage. So to what extent can we see Mann as the Dziga Vertov of the Internet age? What are the similarities/differences between the man with a movie camera and (the) Mann with a wearable, wireless, webcamera?

I'm not trying to exaggerate the parallels here, but would simply like to propose that Vertov's figure provides a useful model against which to compare Mann's projects. In thinking about this question, we might focus on a variety of issues: technology, audience, ideology, purpose, etc. Anyway, I'll leave you to think about this and start posting some thoughts about it.

[For background on Vertov, see the recommended text by Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, 51-71.]

5: Testimonies

* Deirdre Boyle, "Furor Over Fugitive"
* Independent Media Center. See in particular the link (lower left of page) to the Seattle section on the recent events at the WTO in Seattle.
* witness.org. Documentary site on global human rights issues.

Political documentary is a vast field, and its legacy in the interactive media of the Internet and the Web is a complex question. Over the next two weeks, we'll be looking at a couple of Web sites, the Independent Media Center's site and the Witness site, which nevertheless seem exemplary of this legacy, and which may for this reason enable us to formulate some answers to the question.

As both these sites exemplify, one of the most important differences between these Web-based documentary sites and older forms of documentary may be the shift from documentary as the work of one photographer/filmmaker/videographer to documentary as a collective project. This collective nature of documentary is of course anticipated in earlier "guerrilla media" collectives, but it seems to go much further when documentary enters the interactive domain.

Given the complexity of the field, what follows attempts simply to map out some areas for consideration when looking at the sites assigned for this week. Deirdre Boyle will also be on hand from next Friday to help us flesh out some of the topics mentioned below, especially with regard to what "guerrilla media" becomes in the age of the Internet.

***

In his book Blurred Boundaries, the film theorist Bill Nichols differentiates between two major traditions in documentary filmmaking: political/historiographic documentary and ethnographic documentary.

The political documentary tradition extends from the work of Vertov and Grierson to movements such as the so-called Third Cinema movement in Latin America and Africa in the 60s and 70s. Within this tradition, documentary (or fiction film) is conceived not as entertainment but as an instrument of progressive social/political change, often in ongoing struggles over political emancipation, labor issues, social justice, etc. Understandably, filmmaking conceived in these terms places less importance on production values and more on the success of a film in mobilizing its audience around the issues it presents. In the 70s and 80s, the advent of the Portapak and its associated possibility of cheap video production further led to the increasing use of video by grassroots organizations in places such as Latin America to create networks of support in struggles over labor or women's issues (often related).

One contemporary form of political documentary is what John Hess and Patricia Zimmerman call transnational documentary. Examples here might include the National Labor Committee's videos Zoned for Slavery or Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti, respectively about The Gap and Disney's labor policies in El Salvador and Haiti. Many of today's transnational documentaries, indeed, are concerned with questions of social and economic justice in the so-called "new world order" of the IMF and the WTO. Other themes include indigenous rights, and environmental issues. As with earlier forms of political documentary, such work is explicitly intended to mobilize its audience in support of larger struggles for political, economic, and/or social justice.

The coming of the Internet and the World Wide Web, it need hardly be emphasized, has had a major impact on "guerrilla media" practices of the kind mentioned above. The Net/Web are highly attractive to anyone interested in using media (photography, film, video, or other documents) for activist purposes.

Most obviously, they offer an alternative distribution network to those of corporate media, and thus offer the possibility of bypassing the filtering of information, as described by Chomsky and Herman in Manufacturing Consent, imposed by the vested economic and other interests of corporate media.

Second, the web's capacity to support a variety of media formats makes it possible to combine formats in a new format which might be called "hyperdocumentary." Of course, documentary film/video often also incorporates other forms of media document (sound recordings, photographs, maps, newspaper headlines, etc.), but web-based hyperdocumentary offers greater possibilities for combining such documents--including, of course, video itself.

Third, the interactivity of web sites not only improves on the limited possibilities in this area offered by documentary film/video, but makes it possible for entire debates to take place on the site, either among supporters or adversaries of the projects of the site, The concept of "documentary" in this context moves beyond a discrete viewing period, but becomes an ongoing engagement with dynamic content which can extend over many months or even years.

Finally, both the Web and the larger Internet of which it is a part expand the possibilities for political networking (as, for example, with grassroots video networks in Latin America) from a regional or national to a potentially global scale. It goes without saying that for those concerned with questions of social, economic, or political justice at the transnational or global level, in order to be effective any mobilization of resistance around a specific issue has to take place on an equally transnational/global scale. The importance of the Net/Web is, precisely, that as a global network itself, it makes such networking possible, and is thus able to mobilize people internationally (or transnationally) to an unprecedented degree.

The recent swarming of global activists in protest at the WTO in Seattle is a case in point, and this is why one of the sites we'll be looking at is one of the key sources of alternative documentary information about this event and the protests surrounding it. Even for someone not in sympathy with the ideals or methods of the protesters, the events at Seattle offer a spectacular example of the possibilities the Net/Web offers political activists today for using documentary media to mobilize resistance to globalization on an appropriately transnational scale.

In the above, I've focused only on the positive contributions of interactive media to the project of political documentary. One other question worth examining, though, might be to think about the limitations or problems of sites such as those we'll be discussing, in comparison to historical forms of documentary of the type I've been describing. What about questions of truth, and the problems of falsified information we've already touched on in the discussion of fake documentary? What about questions of misinformation? Then again, how do we decide where "misinformation" or "propaganda" ends and "truth" begins? Isn't it a problem when anyone with a digital camera can upload streaming video to a site without any means of certifying the ideological or institutional source of the information, the trustworthiness or even simply the analytical competence of the person providing it? These, then, are some of the questions which we might want to consider as we look at these sites over the next two weeks.

6: Writing the Event: Collective Memory

In addressing this week's topic on interactive documentary as collective memory, we'll be focusing on two sites: Re: Vietnam: Stories Since the War and Hong Kong '97: Lives in Transition.

Both sites are projects of P.O.V. Interactive, an experimental project of P.O.V. creator Marc Weiss to explore more interactive, participatory forms of documentary on the Web.

In 1997, Weiss founded Web Lab, a New York-based non-profit organization intended to support innovative uses of the Web as a means of bringing together communities to discuss personal and public issues. One of Web Lab's first initiatives was the Web Development Fund, which provides funding and support for innovative web projects proposed by independent producers.

Marc Weiss will be joining us online to discuss P.O.V.'s Vietnam and Hong Kong sites next Friday 5 May. While reviewing the sites and over the coming week, then, keep in mind any specific questions you'd like to ask Marc when he joins us next Friday.

I'll be posting some introductory remarks on this week's topic during the weekend. For the moment, concentrate on taking a good look at the Vietnam and Hong Kong sites, and if you have more time, any of the other special sites on the P.O.V. site (Rabbit in the Moon is expecially good).

***

The two P.O.V. websites, Re: Vietnam: Stories from the War, and Hong Kong: Lives in Transition, are both exemplary of documentary as a form of collective memory, organized in this case around two major historical events: the Vietnam war and the British return of Hong Kong to China in July 1997.

In some ways, these sites recall earlier documentary projects in film and video, which are similarly organized around personal, first-hand testimonies of historical events and/or experiences, and thereby attempt to use their respective media to create an archive of collective memory. One thinks, for example, of Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity, on the issue of French collaboration during the German Occupation of WWII, or Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, a nine-hour compilation of interviews with Holocaust survivors. Both films had a major impact when broadcast on European and American television: Ophuls's film, for example, was originally banned in France because of its comprehensive debunking of the cherished French myth of the resistance, and became a catalyst in the painful national recognition of the extent of French collaboration in the deportation of Jews during the Occupation.

Perhaps the main point of resemblance between the Vietnam and Hong Kong sites and historical documentaries of this sort is the telling of stories, and a conception of history not as one grand narrative of the expert historian, but as constituted by the fragmentary, partial, micro-narratives of historical individuals of their personal experiences. History as a kind of collage, then. (This popular-memory model of history, by the way, has arguably become the dominant one in recent decades, for example in the works of historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie or Pierre Nora.)

While the approach of the Vietnam and Hong Kong sites has antecedents in older documentary media, however, as a medium for documenting collective memory the web also offers certain possibilities which are not available in these older media. One thing we may want to think about and discuss over the next two weeks, then, is what those additional possibilities might be; as well, perhaps, as the limitations of web-based documentary projects such as the Vietnam and Hong Kong sites compared to similar projects in film or video.

In thinking about how documentary-as-collective-memory on the web differs from its counterparts in older media, it may be useful to start out by thinking about how either the Vietnam or the Hong Kong documentaries might have looked if they'd been produced in those older media, for example as TV documentaries. There have of course been plenty of such documentaries about either subject, so the question is: what exactly makes the web documentaries different, or better (or, of course, not as effective). The answers are obviously not quite the same in the case of each documentary, so I'll limit my discussion here to the Hong Kong documentary. (How this differs from the Vietnam one will of course be an additional subject for discussion.)

If we forget all logistical difficulties in the production process for a moment, we can of course imagine the Hong Kong project as a more conventional TV documentary in the now-common "video-diary" format. For example, each of the participants could have been given a camcorder (or a film crew), and asked to "tell their own story" of the handover. These diaries could then have been edited and assembled into a 2-3 hour film which might have been broadcast later in the year after the handover itself took place on 1 July 1997. Arguably, such a project would have been far less interesting than the web-based project. Why?

Event
One way of understanding this is to think about the concept of "event". The "event" here can be understood in two ways: as the political-historical event (the British return of Hong Kong to China, its prelude and aftermath); and the documentary itself as a media event (for example, the date of its release or when it's broadcast on TV). So what's the difference between these 2 "events" in the case of the (imaginary) TV or the web documentary? From our perspective today, perhaps, not that much, in that we experience the documentary retrospectively (the way, for example, we might rent the video). But at the time, the difference is considerable, in that the difference between the time of production of the documentary and its time of reception by its audience is reduced to almost nothing: because of the scheduling of the project over the six months around the central date of July 1, people using the web were provided with a documentary as a process rather than a product, a (more-or-less) live event continually developing over 6 months (rather than in 3 hours for one evening on TV). In this sense, at least, the web documentary clearly offers greater immediacy than a more conventional TV documentary.

Community
A second difference of the web documentary emerges if we think about the concept of "community". One of Marc Weiss's key interests in exploring the possibilities of the web for documentary work was its capacity to act as a catalyst for mobilizing communities around certain political, social, or other issues. If we return to our imaginary TV documentary again for a moment, we can see that its possibilities in this area, while not entirely negligeable, are rather limited. By comparison, the web documentary shows possibilities which, while perhaps modest, are certainly more interesting: for the duration of the project, we see, a small community did clearly emerge to share stories of their experiences about the event taking place. Each of the diary authors could, of course, read and react to any of the other authors' contributions, so interactivity was in this sense built into the actual production of the documentary itself. Arguably, though, perhaps the most important part of the site is not the Diary but the Discussion section, where the documentary's audience at large was able to react to it and interact with its producers while it was still in progress/process. This again seems to be an advance over the TV "your letters" model (which, incidentally, P.O.V. also uses for its broadcast TV documentaries). From this perspective, then, the distinction between the documentary-as-event and audience feedback gets blurred, as the feedback has the potential to change the direction or outcome of the documentary as it's actually evolving. We're dealing here again, then, with a model of documentary not as a finished product which is reacted to after the fact, but as an open-ended, ongoing, interactive exchange between producers and audience. There have been some attempts at this in older forms of documentary (in Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer, for example, people interviewed are shown their interviews and their reactions to them is incorporated into the film) but I don't think to the same degree that we see in web-based documentary.

There are other topics we could consider: it's interesting, for example, that one of the journal authors (Jennie Au) isn't actually in Hong Kong (she's writing from Westchester, New York), but is still connected to them by her family there. So the transnational/global nature of the documentary production, and the web's facilitation of this, is another aspect worth considering: the web documentaries producers don't have to be physically present in the same location, but can literally be all over the world (a bit like this class, actually ;-).

Anyway, these reflections should help to start the ball rolling. I'd be particularly interested to hear your thoughts on how the Hong Kong documentary differs from the Re: Vietnam one, or from my imaginary TV video-diary format that it might have taken, or any suggestions as to how it might have been improved, either as a means of "writing the event" of the handover of Hong Kong itself, or as a catalyst for mobilizing a discussion community around it. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this!

7: Archiving the Present: Time Capsules

This week we'll be looking at a form of documentary in some ways diametrically opposed to POV's collective-memory sites: digital time capsules, addressed not to the past but the future, in the form of future historians who will one day look back on our present. For a useful introduction to the millenium time-capsule craze, see Pamela LiCalzi O'Connell's article in last year's New York Times, "Time in a Bottle: A Present for the Future".

I'd like you to look at these sites:

* The New York Times Capsule.* On that site, see in particular the video project "A New York Minute" (a missed opportunity for a wonderful web documentary). See also the American Museum of Natural History's recent exhibition organized in conjunction with the Times project.
* The MIT Sloan School's Digital Time Capsule.

Additional recommended (not required) sites on the subject, which might be interesting topics for an analysis:

* Rick Smolan's book and accompanying website, 24 Hours in Cyberspace.
* Douglas Coupland's Reverse Time Capsule on the Hotwired site.

* The Times site requires (free) registration.

***

Inasmuch as it consists of a collection of objects, texts, images, and other documents intended to encapsulate--literally--a particular historical time and place, a time capsule can be seen as a particular form of documentary.

As documentary, however, time capsules are distinguished from other documentary forms by their peculiar sense of temporality. In languages, there is a grammatical tense called the "future anterior", which can best be understood as referring to that which will have been: the speaker, as it were, projects her/himself into the position of someone in the future looking back on the present. Time capsules, addressed to future historians looking back on our present, can be said to operate in the mode of the future anterior (as, incidentally, do politicians who create monuments to their future posterity).

It is in their orientation towards the future, then, that time capsules differ from other forms of documentary, which as we have seen in previous weeks are typically more concerned with documenting history and memories of it. (Or maybe time capsules are simply a futuristic version of the same, basically retrospective project of documentary.)

Time capsules are fraught with paradoxes. It seems clear, for example, that future historians looking back on today will be more preoccupied with the historical significance of our age's fascination with time capsules per se, with what it says about our understanding of history and our relation to it, and with what the contents of the capsules themselves say about our age's understanding of itself at that time, than with their historical "accuracy".

Rather than playing the time-capsule game of assembling collections of "typical" objects, then, a better way of anticipating future historians may be to reflect on this question, of why we're so concerned with pre-empting the future today, with creating our own posterity rather than leaving it to the historians of tomorrow.

This is a larger set of questions about time capsules in general, of course. A more specific set of questions relates to the nature of digital, online, or cyberspace time capsules in particular, of the type exemplified by the MIT Sloan School's project or Rick Smolan's 24 Hours in Cyberspace project. Perhaps what's most revealing about such projects is how they show a recognition that there is something there to document, in the form of an emerging online world parallel to the so-called real world, with its own immaterial cultures as opposed to the anthropologists' material culture. From this perspective, one can ask the same questions of digital time capsules, and their pretensions to encapsulate something called "cyberspace," that one asks of their real-world counterparts: what, exactly, is being documented, and how? What constitutes a "document" in this environment? What does the accumulation of such documents tell us about contemporary understandings of "cyberspace" and the relation of the real world to it?

Having said that, we should also remember that the collections of documents assembled even by real-world time capsules are increasingly media documents, from Polaroids to Pokemon key-chains, and from this perspective the distinction between digital and physical time capsules starts to blur: digital time capsules become just a more effective means of storing information about media than physical ones.

A third important aspect of digital time capsules is the question of technology. These are dilemmas which today's modern art museum curators are continually having to deal with: what is the appropriate way to store, for example, a version of a videogame such as PacMan or Space Invaders? Or even a simple web page? One problem is that both hardware and software technologies are changing so rapidly and are not backwards-compatible, so that old software--say, an Atari videogame--has to be archived with the hardware which originally supported it in order to be accessible at all.

Arguably, the same is true of today's web pages, which are, for example, typically designed for monitors with 1024 X 768 resolution. When we eventually have monitors with a resolution of 1m X 1m., such pages will look about the size of a postage stamp. So the question arises: what is the appropriate format for a digital time capsule? Then again, isn't the use of a soon-to-be antiquated format (e.g. the web page) part of the time capsule itself? Think of the care which goes into designing the outer shell--the actual medium--of physical time capsules such as the one for the New York Times Capsule. From this perspective, then, both physical and digital time capsules provide a particularly clear example of how the medium is the message, or more exactly of how the digital message may be inseparable from its specific medium.

Finally, digital time capsules can be seen as just one manifestation of the much larger project--which we'll be turning to next week in our final topic--of documenting the online world of the Internet and the Web. Whereas other online projects are directed towards mapping, indexing, and archiving the Net/Web, as we'll see next week, digital time capsules take a deliberately more selective, fragmented approach to the documentary project.

Some key questions to consider in our discussion, then, are:

* Continuities and differences between digital time capsules and real-world/physical ones
* What constitutes a "document" in the digital realm
* Questions of technology, the message and the medium
* The larger historical significance of digital time capsules

Look forward to reading your own thoughts on these questions and any others you'd like to raise!

8: Virtual Geographies

In this last week of the course, we'll look at attempts to document the web itself, or cyberspace more generally. These attempts can be divided into 3 main forms: indexes, of the type commonly found in your average search portal; archives which attempt to download the entire Web to disk (!); and attempts of various kinds to map cyberspace. It's the last category in particular which we'll be focusing on here.

The best place to start on the topic of mapping cyberspace is Pamela LiCalzi O'Connell's article "Beyond Geography: Mapping Unknowns of Cyberspace," which includes links to a number of useful sites. The ones I'd like us to look at most closely are Martin Dodge's Atlas of Cyberspaces and Jon Ippolito's CyberAtlas project at the Guggenheim museum.

Also recommended (but not required) are the Internet Mapping Project and Omnizone: Mapping Perspectives of Digital Culture.

***

This week's intro is a bit longer than usual, as I wanted to make it also something of a conclusion tying together some of the themes we've been discussing throughout the course.

Throughout this course, we've been looking at the new possibilities offered by the digital, networked, interactive media of cyberspace and the web for documentary practices previously limited to analog, broadcast media. In all of these examples, the web provides a medium for different documentary projects, but does not in and of itself constitute the actual subject-matter of the projects themselves.

As we saw in the case of digital time capsules, however, in recent years cyberspace itself has become the subject of various kinds of documentary project, most notably in Rick Smolan's 24 Hours in Cyberspace book and accompanying website.

What would an interactive documentary of the web itself look like? How does one go about documenting something as vast as the web, still less the immense virtual territory known as "cyberspace"? Even if it were possible, what would be the purpose of such a documentary?

What's striking about the three main forms of documentary practice mentioned above--archiving, indexing, and mapping--is their totalizing goal: the idea of being able to archive, index, map the totality of their object. How much disk space does it require to archive every page on the web? In the early days of the web (say, until the mid-90s), this totalizing goal was still feasible: it was actually possible--if not necessarily desirable--to download every page on the web and archive it; webcrawler programs were able to count and index the number of these pages.

Projects are still underway which aspire to download the entire web at regular intervals and archive it on vast banks of hard-disks as a kind of digital snapshot for future historians--kind of a digital time capsule writ large. But as the web continues to grow, this totalizing goal is likely to become as impossible as it would be to keep an archive of all the TV programming in the world on any given day. The other problem with such projects is that they are, by their very nature, indiscriminate, in contrast to the processes of selection, narrative, and argument characteristic of historical forms of documentary.

In the language of postmodern theory, the emphasis seems to be shifting from representation to simulation (Baudrillard), from representing cyberspace, the web, etc., to the construction of models for it, in a process of cognitive mapping (Jameson). There are, of course, many different forms such maps may take, but what's clear at this point is that today's virtual cartographies are still in an experimental, non-standardized phase, as the multiplicity of maps on display on Martin Dodge's Atlas of Cyberspace site amply attests. It's fascinating to compare these maps with the early maps of global explorers, which look so very different from today's standardized atlases.

The theorist of nationalism Benedict Anderson writes, in his book Imagined Communities, of the key role of maps in defining national territorial borders and creating an imaginary geography of discrete, autonomous nations, so familiar today in the multi-colored patchwork quilt of contemporary atlases. Cybermaps of the kind on display on Martin Dodge's site may play a similar role in naturalizing the virtual territories of tomorrow, but at this point no single cartographic model predominates. One question for the group, then, is this: among the dozen or so different species of map available on Dodge's site, which do you find most compelling from the standpoint of the cognitive mapping of cyberspace, and why?

Personally, the one I found most impressive was Smartmoney's Marketmap, a Java-based, real-time graphic snapshot of the Wall Street stock market, which is a good example of the concept of cognitive mapping. What defines the difference between analog and digital maps, though, is the Marketmap's dynamic nature: the fact that it can be continually updated in real time in response to the constant fluctuations of the market.

Any map of cyberspace is, of course, one kind of document which could provide the raw material for a documentary project, but arguably does not constitute "a" documentary in and of itself, any more than an archive of documents does. If we accept this, we are led back to the question with which we began: what form would a documentary of a virtual environment such as the web take, and what would be its purpose?

To try to answer this question, it's useful--and, I'd argue, will be increasingly necessary--to posit an analogy between the real world and the virtual one of cyberspace. Looked at from this perspective, the idea of documenting cyberspace or the web woud become the equivalent of a real-life documentary filmmaker attempting to document nothing less than the world itself. Interestingly, there is a body of documentary (and pseudo-documentary) work which aspire to do just that, from National Geographic to the global commercials of IBM, AT&T, and Cisco. In documentary film, Ron Fricke's film Baraka is the best recent example of such a documentary. Attempts to document cyberspace or the web such as 24 Hours in Cyberspace are in many ways the counterpart to such real-world documentaries. Like them, they originate exclusively from white Euro-American cultural producers, and are arguably of interest more in terms of what they say about the globalizing nature of the project itself, and what's at stake in it, than with regard to the "accuracy" of the representation.

An alternative to this totalizing/globalizing approach to documenting cyberspace would be to say that the documentarian approaching the world of cyberspace is faced with a set of possibilities similar to those available to documentarians of the real world: that is, just as the documentary filmmakers discussed by Erik Barnouw can be seen as taking up very different stances vis-a-vis the world (Advocate, Bugler, Poet, Observer, etc.) according to their very different agendas (propaganda, political/social change, collective memory), the online world offers a similar multiplicity of potential roles for the documentarian; indeed, many of Barnouw's cast of characters already have their counterparts on the web.

In approaching something like the web, then, this second perspective would be less concerned with finding a way to encompass (or in the case of digital time capsules, encapsulate) the web as a whole, and more with taking up a particular position in relation to it, as Barnouw's poet, advocate, historian, or whatever. Rather than attempting to take up all-encompassing, omniscient positions, such documentarians have more modest, situated goals, of documenting cultural practices, engaging in struggles for social/political justice, and so on. To this extent, the position of the documentarian of cyberspace today in some ways resembles her/his historical one in the real world: as a counterweight to the global entertainment industries and their equally globalizing aspirations to speak for "the world".