Time, Digital Environments, and the Documentary Experience

This article focuses on the temporal aspects of documentary media experiences in online environments, drawing attention to their processual nature and their ephemeral quality. While it makes a case for the loosely structured temporality of process, the article also discusses the forms these documentary processes take as well as the kinds of engagement with the world they produce. It treats these processes as distinctive occurrences, as experiences that arc qualitatively different from other expericnces, looking both at canonical examples of interactive documentary and at the spontaneous formations we associate with contemporary media activism.