New documentary practices associated with cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema began to appear in the mid-1950s when technological developments made film and then video more portable, accessible and affordable. This allowed more people to engage in the practice of documenting. The 1991 video of Rodney King being subjected to police restraint is an example of the continuing power of this shift. An ordinary citizen was able to capture the police brutality with his camcorder, transforming him from a witness to an amateur documentary filmmaker. Scholars have cited the events following the widespread dissemination of the Rodney King video as one of the earliest examples of "participatory culture."

Today's new media continue to reshape documentary practices in significant ways. Recording technologies embedded within personal portable devices such as video-equipped mobile phones and hand-held digital video and still cameras have made it possible for vast numbers of people to engage in citizen journalism and "documentary practices." Additionally, Web 2.0 platforms such as video and photo-sharing websites and blogs now enable amateur "documentarians" to share and collaborate on content in ways never before possible. A practice thatHoward Rheingold and Justin Hall have labeled p2p Journalism, now exists at the blurred boundary where traditional definitions of journalismand documentary meet and influence each other.

Today, people use mobile devices in ways that open new possibilities for the practices of documenting—especially those practices involved in efforts to achieve "filmic truth." For example, in June 2006 a 93-minute remake of Pier Paolo Pasolini's documentary entitled Love Meetings(1965), in which he interviewed Italian citizens about their views on sex in postwar Italy, was shot entirely on a cell phone by Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi. Entitled New Love Meetings, the remake was filmed in MPEG4 format using a Nokia N90. It is the first feature-length movie to be shot entirely on a mobile phone. Their premise was that even though they asked their subjects the same questions that Pasolini had posed, the results of their documentary would be clearly influenced by the medium they used to capture the images. They believed that the use of a cellphone, an instrument of daily life, produced an intimacy absent in Pasolini's movie, making people more spontaneous and open, creating a dialogue more like a chat than an interview. They propose that the line between subject and observer becomes thinner through such practices, as the documentary film-makers present themselves as "normal people" using their cell phones to preserve an instant. New Love Meetings is a prime example of how a specific emerging technology, the mobile phone, is shifting documentary practice today. (see External Links)

Surveillance is the act of observation or monitoring, usually of places, people, and activity, and typically without the subject's knowledge. Much of contemporary surveillance involves observation from a distance with the help of electronic devices, such as telephone tapping, directional microphones, covert listening devices or "bugs", subminiature cameras, closed-circuit television, GPS (Global Positioning System) tracking, electronic tagging, motion tracking, satellites, internet and computer surveillance.