Polyvocality in Interactive Documentary

Abstract

Listening has always been undervalued as a mode of participation both inside and outside Media Studies (Fiumara 1995, Lacey 2013, Lipari 2014). Applying definitions of listening from philosophy, feminist political theory, media studies, and documentary studies to software studies, this paper identifies problematic practices and provides redefinitions and reframes: Listening only qualifies as listening when the listening itself has an effect or changes the listener, in the moment or later.
 As examples of a device of meaningful listening that might be helpful in software design, the very medium used for interactive media, the paper examines two documentary case studies: Lana Lin’s The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018) and Irene Lusztig’s Yours In Sisterhood (2018). Both filmmakers invited volunteers to read aloud on camera; in the case of Lin, the twenty-seven writers, artists, activists, health care advocates, and current and former patients she invited read Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde’s classic 1980 memoir of her breast cancer experience. And in the case of Lusztig, she recruited participants in 32 different US states to read aloud and respond to a selection of letters to the editors at Ms. Magazine from the 70s covering issues of divorce, abortion, rape, discrimination, among many other feminist issues of the day. Both filmmakers also made it clear that they had invited these readings and exposed in multiple ways the mechanics of these readings. The paper argues that both reading aloud and the exposition of the request to read, as a device in the documentaries, is a form of listening and analyzes this through a framework of listening as a participatory process. The paper also identifies the paradiscourses of both projects and the relationships that the respective filmmakers hope to develop with their readers and viewers. Both projects embody a kind of participatory listening that suggests a much-needed antidote to the overlooked practice in software design that assumes listening cannot be participatory.