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Despite the increasing tendency for documentary to function as political discourse, there is little historical work addressing the rhetorical and material influence of documentary in public life. These stories of documentary impulse and political struggle have been only erratically recorded. Documentary scholarship frequently addresses the issues that surround the process of social change, focusing on the screen as the central location for communicative exchange, but there are many other sites of struggle for those working on the ground with documentary and the political process. This chapter will cover the broader questions of documentary and social change, how it functions in relation to generating participatory media cultures. The chapter will specifically address the shifts in the documentary commons and how opportunities for social change emerged as it moved through the introduction of portable analog video recording equipment in the late 1960s and on into a digital culture of new media. This chapter will contribute to articulating the ways in which documentary is a distinct form of discourse that engages the political in patterned ways, creating a mediated commons for the engagement of political struggle.

During the first decade of the new millennium, the virtual ekklesia emerging from vernacular Christian fundamentalism continued to expand and change with the changing media technologies. In particular, the development of increasingly powerful network-based software created different ways for individuals to place their personal content online. Associated with the rise to prominence of the term “blog,” “participatory media” came to dominate the World Wide Web. This chapter charts the rise to dominance of participatory media. The text-based blog became the most common use of participatory media in the movement. On text-based blogs, Web pages that combined authoritative moderation with strong deliberative cues proved to be the most conducive to ritual deliberation. After 2001, these text-based blogs became the primary locations from where participants in the movement enacted their virtual ekklesia.

We are living in a historical moment that will be known for its emphasis on media engagement. The evolution of mobile media technology, the ubiquity of social media, and the omnipresence of multiple media platforms in each of our lives have led to new and evolving modes of interaction with the experience of the media screen. The interactive conditions of digital culture in the United States align with a significant historical moment: growing political and social upheaval, economic crisis, dissatisfaction with representative government, and disillusionment with state institutions. Together, these conditions have given rise to an emerging participatory media culture(s) engaged in addressing problems, exposing exploitation, facilitating media witnessing, and taking back the means of media production and circulation. The chapter argues for an understanding of documentary practice as a mediated commons. This book focuses on how the visual culture(s) of documentary moving images are harnessed as a means of resistance in forms that include witnessing, petition, solidification, polarization, and promulgation. It will examine the ways in which documentary as a mode of production engages in the process of social change.

Chapter 3 explores the transition of social movement media-makers from spokespeople to aggregators and amplifiers of diverse voices from the movement base. The chapter focuses on the events of May Day 2007, when nearly 450 Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers in riot gear attacked a peaceful crowd of thousands of immigrant rights marchers, injuring dozens and hospitalizing several, including reporters. The LAPD eventually paid more than $13 million in damages. However, in the immediate aftermath, the police, nonprofit organizations, and grassroots media-makers fought an intense battle over media attention and framing. The chapter also explores how national TV networks have turned toward a ‘violent conflict’ framing of domestic political protest. Some professional nonprofits reproduced the ‘violent conflict’ frame as a strategy to gain access to broadcast media. At the same time, transmedia organizers challenged the dominant narrative by working to gather, curate, remix, and amplify the voices of marchers who had been attacked. The chapter concludes that professional movement organizations face pressure to shift from speaking for the movement to amplifying the voices of an increasingly media-literate base. Those who make this shift will benefit, while those who attempt to retain control of the conversation will lose credibility.

This chapter focuses on the emergent, participatory practice of fansubbing (‘fan subtitling’), examining its origins within anime subculture and its ongoing evolution. Fansubbing is examined as an informal translation practice that emerged as a subset of media piracy with its own ethical standards and rules of conduct. Much early anime fansubbing focused on redressing the domesticating tendencies of professional services, and in this sense highlighted the gatekeeping, controlling function of translation. Hence, this case study further demonstrates links between piracy, censorship and subversion introduced in the previous chapter. It also demonstrates how fansubbing’s intervention into screen media points to the growing significance of translation as a mode of cultural participation responsive to the intensifying multilingualism of global media and technologies. Fans are discussed as ‘lead-users’ of new technologies that trial functionality and uncover emergent uses, demands and desires along the way—exemplifying the increasingly active and unruly ways in which people currently consume and engage with media. Proposing that fansubbing’s communal, errant tendencies are vital to its re-evaluative function, this chapter identifies a point of difference between the reconceptual program of this book and the notion of ‘abusive subtitling’ (Nornes 1999).

This chapter considers expressions of prejudice that persist in the movement. The virtual ekklesia has allowed people to create enclaves based on highly idiosyncratic interests, such as the End Times, because the Internet allows them to locate each other without reference to geographic location. As a result, digital communication technologies enable them to create virtual communities that foster beliefs that more diverse communities would reject. However, when a group of believers can express intolerance without facing resistance, prejudices can persist. If radical certainty fuels those views with a self-sealing ideology, people may cling to them even when doing so does them harm. They risk being harmed if they retain these beliefs at the cost of alienating themselves from the values that support mainstream discourse.

Environmentalists rarely talk about popular culture, associating it more with the excesses of “throwaway living” than with sustainability's custodial sensibilities. There is some truth to this skepticism. However, that doesn't mean that the popular can never be associated with sustainable living. This chapter explores the complexities of fan culture, which resituates capitalist consumption to sustain other kinds of meaningful connection and attachment. Through collecting and tourism, fans extend musical encounter; with concert-going and narrative, fans create communal sensibility. Combined with participatory media practices that provide alternatives to the established music business, fandom reframes popular culture's potential in sustainability debates.