by J. Nathan Matias

The Electronic Campfire

Film, which has profoundly affected both web nonfiction and even creative nonfiction, is an entire universe of thought, technique, and theory. Unlike the simple structures of writing and audio, for which order is key, the organization of film manages image, text, and sound at the same time. The promise of even richer hypertextual multimedia, of which film would be a subset, has thus heavily included film. This focus on film technique has increased as broadband usage increases.

But we need to be careful not to sell ourselves short. For example, hypertext technology can allow us to recreate the physical layout of a museum. In fact, it has been done in the case of Barnum's lost museum. However, the spatial experience of a museum is much different than the textual experince of hypertext. Instead of duplicating a museum (it makes sense for Barnum's museum, since we don't have the original) outright, we can instead learn things about the basic structure of information within a story, the juxtaposition of sources, and the emotional effect of atmosphere. For Web Documentary to be useful, it needs to be considerably different from documentary. This is why I can like Steven Ambrose's Band of Brothers, love Spielberg's Band of Brothers, and groan at HBO and Time Magazine's Band of Brothers.

Film is the least interactive of all the media and genres studied in this hypertext. This is partly why creative people like it. It gives them so much opportunity to mold the experience. This opportunity for creativity comes at a loss to reader agency. Readers can skim or skip a chapter. Museum visitors can cut right to the souvenir store. But viewers expect television to make things straightforward. Even Ken Burns films, known for their pluralism, come out of disagreement with a much shallower, feel-good idea rather than a sense of complexity and personal involvement.

Reader Agency and Artistic Power are not locked in a struggle for domination. As we see in the Holocaust Memorial Museum (which is itself very crafted), the museum's creators gave the visitors freedom to explore concurrent stories that can't fit into a line. Nonlinearity gave the museum more opportunity for creativity. By embracing the idea of hypertextual, creative nonfiction, we no longer have to worry as much about turning 98 handwritten notebooks into a definitive few hundred pages.

That said, film documentary practices can teach us a great deal about how to be creative in nonfiction writing of any sort.