When Documentaries Meet New Media

Book excerpt: New media and digital technologies open up numerous possibilities to document different versions of reality, which makes it essential to examine how they transform the logic behind the creation and production of documentaries in digital cultures. This study aims to investigate the integration between the traditional documentary and new media: the interactive documentary, in the context of the different sociocultural and technological environments of China and the West. Accordingly, a comparative study on the evolution and integration of these two fields was carried out. The documentary genre brings with it a method of classification and various modes of representing reality, while new media provide new approaches to interactivity as well as the production and distribution of interactive documentaries. Interactive documentaries grow and change as a continuously evolving system, engaging the roles of the author and the user, such that their roles are mixed for better co-expression and the reshaping of their shared environment. In addition, an analytical approach based on the types of interactivity was adopted to explore this new form of documentary; both to deduce how the stories about our shared world can be told and to understand the impact of interactive documentaries on the construction of our versions of the reality as well as our role in it.