Research project

"How has technology changed the opportunities for a social documentary maker over the last ten years?"

Here is the research question I have finalized. At the moment it feels incredibly daunting, as it seems that there are so many different things I can take into account, I'm hoping that what research I've done and will do will help me to shape a narrative to the project, as at the moment I feel a little direction-less.

However, I do have a great interest in the subject, and have an opaque idea of how to go about shaping the answer to my question. At the moment I think a good place to start would be with "current affairs" style news shows, such as Panorama, 60 minutes, Real Story and others. Though labelled as "current affairs news", the actual shows themselves are very much like documentary film. Working on a production of this sort could be appealing to a documentary film maker; however getting to the stage where you are able to do so takes years of work and, I imagine, a fair bit of luck. I want to luck further into these, and further into other documentary opportunities available to film-makers back in 2001 and try to show how these narrow openings have widened as technology has improved and increased in affordability.

I looked into Ofcom too. The wikipedia article describes ofcom as "the government-aproove regulatory authority for the broadcasting and telecommunications industries in the United Kingdom." and lists their responsibilities as "wide-ranging, covering all types of industries and processes. It has a statutory duty to the interests of citizens and consumers by promoting competition, and protecting consumers from what might be considered harmful or offensive material." This is clearly pertinent to my research, as compliance with Ofcom is necessary to have your work viewed on British television.

The growth of the internet is also going to be another huge factor in improving opportunities for documentary makers, as it provides a platform outside regulatory bodies like Ofcom from censoring or shaping your work, and allows people without the CV to work on something like Panorama to have their work viewed by possibly an even larger audience than you'd get with panorama. I'd like to look into viewing figures back in 2001 too, to see the sort of following these sorts of shows had (and what they have now).

As far as I can see, the releasing of content online has many bonuses for the audience too. For one, if there's something you don't understand in a documentary, you have the ability to rewind and watch over it again, or perhaps pause, do some research on something perhaps they don't understand, and --importantly-- to have an absolutely huge resource for checking the facts being shown. I imagine this must put much more of an onus on the creator to be absolutely critically accurate and honest, as you stand a much bigger chance of having your work criticized if it contains inaccuracies. In 2001, if panorama released a documentary that had inaccuracies in it, it could be investigated internally, apologies exchanged or diciplinary action maybe, but there wouldn't be much worldwide discussion of it (as there is now). It is left in the hands of the government to control and regulate that content. If a documentary is released online that contains inaccuracies, not only are there millions of possible fact checkers to point them out, but people are actually able to discuss and share ideas they have about the documentary with eachother online, in comments sections and blogs. Without the internet you could pretty much talk about it with the people in the room, and that's as far as it can go.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries

This is a subsection of a website I visit often called reddit.com. Documentaries hosted online can be posted there by anyone, and with each user granted the ability to either vote "up" or "down" once on things they see, which allows the most popular content to be at the top of the page and seen by everyone. If a documentary is known to be inaccurate or misleading, it is downvoted and hardly seen at all. I believe this is an excellent system, and given the community itself is made up of millions of users with a combined knowledge of a vast number of subjects content is scrutinized heavily and honestly. Comments on the content there can be upvoted or downvoted too, so if a user claims a documentary is terrible, or inaccurate, when it's actually good and accurate, that comment will be downvoted, and users can see it is probably a bad comment (and have the ability to go online and check for themselves if what they are saying is true).

Anyway, this is all very vague, and I need to begin looking in depth into these areas and more to see if my preconceptions are accurate or not.