Week 11 Reading..

This weeks reading was (in my opinion) not an enjoyable one, so I’ll highlight some of the interesting points I came across….

Adrian provided us with a bit of backstory: “This essay is from the same journal issue as the very first reading from Aston and Gaudenzi. This journal appeared in 2012 and is one of the very first collections dealing specifically with interactive documentary. Dovey has done research in hypertext, games, cinema, video, and interactive documentary. Rose is a former film maker/producer who know works between academic projects around interactive documentary while also being a production consultant/producer of interactive documentaries in the United Kingdom.”

The reading was exploring “…what might happen to documentary in the sea of ‘ubiquitous data’ conjured by the marketeers of Web 2.0” (3).
Likening classical forms of documentary to the ‘age of steam’, Dovey and Rose state that “The documentary film mission has been to mediate society to itself, to let one part of a society see another, to create a very particular kind of dialogue” (3). They then go on to state an interesting point, claiming that documentary in the 20th century “…was as much about changing the world as it was observing it” (3). No doubt, created by the development of technology.
Bill Nichols is also mentioned, as Dovey and Rose use his ‘well known position’ that “…documentary presents us with arguments about our shared world, propositions about the world that are made as part of social praxis” (3).

Dovey and Rose’s article mainly focuses on the fact that never before have we been ably to access more documentary material than we are today, with the online world overflowing with possibilities. It is through this article that we investigate the possibilities that this unlocks for documentary (4).

Dovey and Rose draw on the “art” (can we call it a documentary?) of “we feel fine”  , a website launched in 2005, which collates ‘human feelings’ fro a number of weblogs.

“Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.”   
– We Feel Fine, Mission

We’ve been shown this “art work” in networked media previously, so it was easier to follow along what the authors were talking about in this section. It was interesting to read about what Jonothan Harris thought about the site (one of the creators), which was in relation to storytelling.
“the partial glimpse into somebody’s life that he saw in personal fragments, the scraps of presence left by our online behaviours”.
It is truly scary to think just how much our devices are able to record our behaviours, without even the smallest amount of our intentions. It’s also to interesting to note that We Feel Fine is essentially authored by the whole world (6), and is “…a response to the ocean of data that is both consequence and driver of online social mediation” (6).

Dovey and Rose also speak of “Mappiness”, “a free phone app [which] asks you twice a day to rate your level of happiness, relaxation and ‘awakens’ on a scale of 1-10” (7). Now I know that i’m supposed to be focusing on this cool new way of gathering and documenting our world, but I’m more interested in the findings. The researches behind Mappiness are interested in finding a link between feelings and environment.

“It turns our people are happier in every other environment than the urban environment, and the effect seems to be between about one and five points. 
Mountains and coniferous forests have come out as the happiest places so far – four or five points higher than a continuous urban setting…” (Heathcote, 2010) (7)

So I guess this isn’t world shattering conclusions, but it is a pretty interesting way to get to those conclusions.

R E F
– Dovey, Jon, and Mandy Rose. “We’re Happy and We Know It: Documentary, Data, Montage.” Studies in Documentary Film 6.2 (2012): 159–173. You’ll find copies of at the University of West England eprint repository.