The term “networked society” describes the many different phenomena related to the social, political, economic and cultural changes caused by the increase in connected digital information. In this essay I aim to assess the value of networked society within the creative disciplines of documentary film, fine art and dance. I intend to convey the positive value of networked society on my chosen creative disciplines by looking at many different sources and view points and assessing both the positive and negative impacts of networked society.
In the recent years networked society has begun to have an impact at every level of the documentary filmmaking process and this impact has been hugely beneficial to filmmakers. During the creation part of the filmmaking process, networked society has made it possible to create collaborative work with other creatives who are living or working in a completely different part of the world. Gary Hustwit director of Helvetica and Urbanized explains how he makes use of the social network site twitter, “If I needed a camera person in Rome to get a few shots there, I tweeted and found someone.” (M. Sinclair, 2012: 14) Both Hustwit's screening tour and release of the his films were driven by twitter and web based distribution.
The developments in networked society are also beneficial when trying to raise capital in order to produce a film. This has been made possible by the crowd-sourced fundraising model of sites such as Kickstarter, the worlds largest funding platform for creative projects which uses social media to reach a large number of small contributors who show an interest in a certain project idea.
Hustwit raised over $100,000 via the web to make his documentary Urbanized, because social media helped him
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