Wikumentary

Both the primacy and complexity of information have drawn me to careers in media. Information is one of our most basic social needs, and also one of our most valuable assets. Information - about ourselves, our surroundings, others - is what underlies the entire human experience. As such, to improve the flow of information between people is to directly and positively influence their quality of life. I want to use media to increase the quality of life for as many people as possible. Specifically, I am interested in using nonfiction multimedia storytelling for social empowerment and community economic development.

I hope to accomplish this by building collaborative software, media tools, and web applications that allow people (especially youth and disadvantaged populations) to collect media (primary sources) about themselves and their communities into networked, interactive repositories. These multimedia databases would use stories as an organizing principle. In a current web project, I call this “wikumentary” – a portmanteau of the words “wiki” and “documentary” – and I believe it represents the next step for documentary work. Such processes can be accomplished through progressive business models and social entrepreneurship, melding and fostering opportunities for digital literacy, storytelling, community empowerment, and new modes of economic development that include substantial social components. Ultimately, I believe wikumentary provides an avenue to improved quality of life and “alternative” development (1).

To date, my implementation of these ideas at http://wikumentary.net has been limited to traditional wiki organization and editing techniques, which are unfortunately rather rudimentary. I have ideas to advance my work, but lack the skills, which is why I turn to the MSI program (where new skills would lead to even more ideas, ad infinitum!). I would like to explore 3D visualization of multimedia databases. I want to dig into accessible programming languages like Scratch and add intuitive ways for people to incorporate their existing media artifacts. I want to build large, touch-screen interfaces for people to communally interact with wikis in real-space. I want to see autobiographical stories proliferate and hyperlink to each other in the same way as the nonfiction articles on Wikipedia. I want to provide social tools that give people ways to leverage qualitative information about themselves for community economic development. I’d like to help usher in a new kind of economy that finally capitalizes on the democratic potential of the information age, an iconomy (2). I’d like to build flexible, scalable story networks that allow people to imaginatively and interactively assert and explore both their singular identities and their relationships to the rest of the world. I hope to expand the open source options of locative media production. I want to move beyond Google Maps, and help incorporate cartographic media production into basic new media literacy skill sets. I hope to push the artistic frontier of lifelogging. I want to foster digital fluency by providing opportunities to critically engage with identity construction and representation through media – and to make that process fun, easy, and interactive. I could, perhaps, use a little focus, too.

1 Friedmann, John. Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development.
2 Nutt, M. and Schwartz, G. The Story Economy.