*Details included in the screenshot*reply to this peer:
Neither human nor social (public) documents hold higher rank over each other. Both human and social documents have individual significance, an authority to report “human actuality—rendering and representing for others what has been witnessed, heard, overheard, or sensed” (Coles 87), and according to William Stott, both try to “influence its audience’s intellect and feeling” (28). Perhaps, when used together, both human and social documentary reaches the highest level of engagement and certainty, conveying “the texture of actuality as well as facts [note: the term ‘actuality’ does not always translate as fact]” (Stott 143).
We could easily take James Agee’s documentary book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and showcase how both human and social documents highlight the “social and cultural and historical on the one hand [social], [and] individual or idiosyncratic on the other [human]. However, since most of you may not be familiar with this text, we could focus our attention on documentary film to illustrate the use of each type of document.
Think about it, what tools does a documentary film use to try and influence, to elicit an authentic audience response? Now, we have this discussion later on in the course, but for our purposes here, we could easily take any documentary film and suggest that it contains interviews and general information, right? Most documentaries use formal interviews from experts as well as anecdotal interviews from witnesses or whatever. Interviews, mostly the anecdotal interviews, are human documents; they truly evoke the actual experience and a more dominant sense of emotion. On the other side, we may have statistical information or general knowledge, which represents actuality, usually confused with fact and has less emotion. However, though social documents may not contain emotion, they possibly provoke emotion, the emotion in the audience. Have you ever seen the Vietnam Memorial? In person? Though there is no emotion in this public document, the emotional response to this actuality is intense.
The bottom line, then, what I want us to appreciate and recognize is that both human and social documents have subjective and objective influences, and that they both represent a human actuality, and not fact, but, arguably, when used in tandem, our actuality becomes fact…not to be confused with the Rudy Giuliani statement that “truth is not truth.” LOL