Computer-based media are by definition interactive as they involve clicking icons, choosing links and making decisions about the pathway to be taken through the website.
Within the online environment of The Wrong Crowd (www.abc.net.au/wrongcrowd) the uncovering of history had to be presented in a navigable non-linear form. This provoked some creative tension in that I needed to depart from my experience as a broadcast television producer who was used to creating a rhythm that sustained a coherent linear documentary argument.
Unlike a broadcast audience, a broadband audience is proactive and, by nature of the form, can participate in the construction of the pathway to be navigated, and thus the sequence in which the narration will unfold. The fixed temporal montage of the linear television documentary becomes an ad hoc spatial montage, a series of arbitrarily open windows on the computer screen, a sequence of visual, potential non sequiturs of the viewer’s individual choice. As a documentary producer committed to producing a credible history, I needed to ensure that the navigation of the database, the repository of the verifications, was navigable in a way that supported the unfolding of a particular historical argument. The context of the search for the visible and auditory evidence, the foundation for any historical documentary account, had to be negotiated intuitively by the viewer and yet still conform to the requirement that the documentary maintain an overall coherence as a logical argument.
SOURCE: Beattie, D. (2008), ‘Documentary expression online: The Wrong Crowd, a history documentary for an ‘electrate’ audience’, Studies in Documentary Film 2: 1, pp. 61–78, doi: 10.1386/sdf.2.1.61/1.