Invisible evidence: Serial and the new unknowability of documentary

Abstract

Ora uses the first season of Sarah Koenig’s Serial to launch comparisons between 1990s documentary film theory and contemporary claims of ‘post-truth‘in new media. The politics of testimony and memory, visual proof and its credulity, and, ultimately, the role of narrative voice within online culture contribute to decoding the text and reception of this wildly successful podcast. Ora demonstrates that, just as theorists including Linda Williams heralded the end of the ironclad image with Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, scholars may similarly position Serial as a case study for seismic shifts in non-fiction media and its reception.