Interactive documentary as relational media: exploring an actor-network theory approach

ABSTRACT This paper explores Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a framework for understanding interactive documentary. It examines Adrian Miles’s work in this area, where he uses ANT as a way of conceptualising interactive documentary as socio-technical media assemblages and consequently to question the relationship between human and non-human agency as understood within the field. After introducing ANT and reviewing Miles’s position, the paper engages in a detailed discussion of ANT’s key concepts in the context of specific interactive documentaries showing how these concepts operate and examining the insights they provide. This discussion supports and extends Miles’s position while also broadening and deepening interactive documentary’s engagement with ANT through a more detailed and systematic engagement with its concepts than has been attempted previously. The paper concludes by raising issues concerning the adaption of ANT’s concepts to the field, including the question of whether they offer a complete theoretical framework for understanding interactive documentary and by suggesting future lines of enquiry to address these issues.