Crowdsourced documentary in the age of digital participation: A study on collective documentary production

Abstract

While online and digital technologies have enabled the collective production of a documentary, facilitating content production with crowdsourcing, this also raises issues regarding authorship in shared media production. In the frame of participatory culture, people are able to create and share their own content and this possibility can be harnessed in documentary making that evolves reflecting on on the contemporary participatory trend. The Life in a Day film project (Macdonald, 2011), is a characteristic example of such a collective documentary production that aims to depict how people live around the world, being a compilation of user-generated videos from people of different countries. This thesis draws on the question on whether Life in a Day can be looked at as a co-authored documentary, examining both aspects of participation and collaboration in its production process. The discussion aims to provide insights into the level of agency, that the audience has attained in contemporary cultural production.