In digital terms, the heart of the matter is not how digital technologies affect the photographic image itself but how they can contextualize the photographer's point of view. Normally, we think of context as something that is provided to the viewer, a new tool for understanding something already created. But context can also be a tool for artists. Documentary artists, especially, have found themselves caught between what can be depicted and its relationship to important background information. These artists are well aware of the limits of their own points of view.
Digital media provides documentary artists new ways to address issues of context.
Many times rethinking context has even infiltrated a project's parameters, changing it's nature and purpose. In the electric age,' he asserts in Understanding Media, 'we necessarily participate in depth, in the consequences of our every action . . . I hear the word interactvity, I want to reach for my gun. Andre Simon Somewhere between the utopian promise of commitment through connectedness and the hair trigger finger fantasies of a video gamer, the reality of interactions is creating a worldview. Mark Klett's Third View, Joseph Rodriguez and Ruben Martinez's The New Americans, all of the online zines and galleries encourage some level of feedback that is more than an electronic letters to the editor.