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Seeing in the dark -- "We see what we want to believe" : archival logic and database aesthetics in the war films of errol morris -- Networked audiences : moveon.org and brave new films -- "States of exception" : the paradox of virtual documentary representation -- Technology, transparency and the digital presidency -- Post-truth politics : conspiracy media and the specter of "fake news".

"This boldly original book traces the evolution of documentary film and photography as they migrated onto digital platforms during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Kris Fallon examines the emergence of several key media forms—social networking and crowdsourcing, video games and virtual environments, big data and data visualization—and demonstrates the formative influence of political conflict and the documentary film tradition on their evolution and cultural integration. Focusing on particular moments of political rupture, Fallon argues that ideological rifts inspired the adoption and adaptation of newly available technologies to encourage social mobilization and political action, a function performed for much of the previous century by independent documentary film. Positioning documentary film and digital media side by side in the political sphere, Fallon asserts that "truth" now lies in a new set of media forms and discursive practices that implicitly shape the documentation of everything from widespread cultural spectacles like wars and presidential elections to more invisible or isolated phenomena like the Abu Ghraib torture scandal or the "fake news" debates of 2016.
"Looking at a unique and intriguing set of 'hybrid media,' Fallon convincingly makes a claim about a change in the form of new media, one linking politics, aesthetics, and technology." ALEXANDRA JUHASZ, Brooklyn College, CUNY
"Where Truth Lies does the difficult and much-needed work of unpacking how the documentary impulse is shifting in the digital age, both through the profound influence of digital aesthetics and computational thinking and through the ways traditional documentary is infusing digital expression." JENNIFER MALKOWSKI, author of Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary
KRIS FALLON is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at the University of California, Davis."

Recent scholarship treats the transition to the digital format in documentary film as a straightforward change in production practices or distribution channels, ignoring the deeper implications of digital technology for non-fiction moving image media. Far from a simple transition in the technology used to shoot and produce these films, however, digital technology has altered, and been altered by, documentary film to a far greater extent than any previous period in its history. The first decade of the twenty first century gave rise to dramatic technological, aesthetic and political revolutions around the globe, dramatic events mirrored in the rapid evolution of documentary form across the same time period. This project focuses on the emergence of digital documentary in the context of the ideological shifts and social conflicts of the early 21st century. As blogs, social networks and mobile technologies became the connective tissue of political dissent and social mobilization over this period, these technologies utilized documentary's unique synthesis of visible evidence and rhetorical argument, while pushing its traditional form in unexpected new directions. In the polarized climate surrounding contentious events such as the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq, new modes of visual representation became both viable and desirable. Data visualization and virtual environments began picturing the world alongside, and even within feature-length films. Beyond simply providing visual content on newly digital platforms, documentary film now provides a conceptual framework for understanding much of the social impulse of political activism today. Conversely, computational forms of representation and social organization radically undermine the privileged if problematic role optical media once claimed in representing reality. By identifying the moments of rupture where prior forms of representation and persuasion were discarded or discredited, I demonstrate that `truth' now lies in a new set of discursive practices emerging and coalescing over the last 10 years, standards which implicitly shape the documentation of everything from widespread social movements like Occupy to isolated, viral phenomena like the "Kony 2012" video.

Shows how aesthetic, ethical, and political questions intersect in a range of art forms as found in traditional mediaAddresses key aesthetic, ethical, and political questions in visual mediaExamines contemporary films, television, photography, painting and new visual media such as videogames, Facebook, and interactive documentariesOffers an international mix of emerging and senior authors with interdisciplinary expertiseThis book investigates the interrelations between aesthetics, ethics and politics in a variety of visual media forms, ranging across art installations, film and television, interactive documentaries, painting, photography, social media and videogames. An international mix of emerging and established authors, with interdisciplinary expertise, explores how different ethical questions, political implications and aesthetic pleasures arise and shape one another in distinct visual media.Investigating themes such as the use of cinema as a medium for ethical and political thought, how documentary subjects both conceal and reveal truth, the new ethical challenges arising from interactive media and the role of images in responding to political events and trauma, this is a groundbreaking work about the interrelations of aesthetic, ethical and political values in visual media