Catherine Summerhayes

Web-Weaving: the Affective Movement of Documentary Imaging

In Sherry Turkle’s (2006, p. 220) words: ‘We are witnessing a new form of sociality in which the isolation of our physical bodies does not indicate our state of connectedness but may be its precondition.’ In this sense, the human rights site ‘Crisis in Darfur’, brought to you by Google Earth (GE) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) documents an earth haunted by real people, both viewers and the viewed. States of embodiment involved in our actual cognitive and physical manipulations of personal computer technologies usually, in Turkle’s sense, also involve our physical isolation from those we connect with via these technologies. This chapter investigates ways in which we nevertheless make connections with the people represented on our Human Computer Interfaces (HCIs) despite this physical isolation via our connections with the websites in which these representations are found together with our subsequent connections to those who create these websites and the potential links between them. In the broader context of documentary discourse, I am investigating and speculating here on some of the ways in which web documentaries might be situated within the web itself.