Smartphones and evocative documentary practices

Abstract

Smartphones are part of a convergence culture that is reconfiguring our relationship with media and arguably shifting our understanding of documentary practices. Smartphones may now be understood as powerful enablers that provide users with the tools and resources necessary to capture and share mediated traces of the people and places that form part of our everyday habitus. In this chapter, Dean Keep puts forward a proposition that the smartphone is more than a dynamic networked media tool; rather, it is a "digital Wunderkammer", a portable database to aid the storage and retrieval of captured moments that can be later used for the production of a wide range of documentary stories.