Documentary Film in the Age of the Digital
To the Online Course
In the first decade of the 21st century, digitalisation was already in full swing. In the 1980s and 1990s, the personal computer, email and the World Wide Web had already radically changed communication, everyday life and global economy. But despite these eye-catching inventions, which are now an integral part of our everyday lives, a more precise description of what is meant by 'digitalisation' is not so easy.
In the foreground, of course, is technical digitisation: the development of computers as universal tools for processing any form of data; the development of the internet as a universal medium into which all other media and communication channels can plug; and the increasing inter- and transmediality, facilitated by the level of abstraction of digital data, in which everything - an image, a sound, a text - is encoded in the form of zeros and ones and thus becomes calculable.
The digital, however, also includes the ever increasing communicative interconnectedness of everyone and everything: initially in the form of email, forums or newsgroups; then from 2000, summarised under the catchword of the social web, also on platforms such as MySpace (2003) or Facebook (2004). Digitalisation also includes a special form of globalisation that goes hand in hand with a phenomenological shrinking of space and time: The digital, interpreted in this way, then coincides with instantaneous gratification and just-in-time production.
Finally, digitalisation goes hand in hand with the catchphrase of the attention economy. The concept, formulated as a problem, had already sprung up in the 1980s with the multiplication and differentiation of television channels and the fragmentation of audiovisual media distribution markets into three rather distinct parts: cinema, television and video. What became important now for everybody wishing to participate in media production was not a gated access to the media distribution channels, but rather making one's voice heard in the global village's babble of voices and having one's image catch the eye on the many second and third screens that viewers now carried around with them.
Topics of this Unit
The Documentary becomes Digital, Aesthetic of the Digital