Video is Justice

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I dragged the text file that was Cell Phone Camera Forever out of the trash before posting it last January, because I was second-guessing up to that moment whether it wasn’t too obvious or incoherent. Since then, it is still one of the most popular posts on this website. It seems none of us quite know what to make of our cheap, immediate access to creating media. Does anyone really want, what Momus called, a “1:1 ratio of experience to writing” (replace “writing” with your media of choice)?
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A 1:1 ratio of experience to writing means that you’ve become an efficient journalistic machine: nothing you do ever goes to waste. Every single thing you experience gets written about somewhere. It doesn’t have to be experience in the real world; it almost seems like I write, now, about every website I visit too.

I need to revise the ultimate point in that post. A camera can be an interruption, it can create a barrier between you and the moment in your life you mean to be enjoying. Mrs. Tulip give a great example of this:

Two schools I have taught at in the past couple of years ban camera use at their high school musical night. One of the reasons is because students look out to the audience to see if mum and dad are watching. If they see only a sea of lenses instead of adoring eyes they are met with technology rather than soul.
We are obsessed with recording life from our point of view, even when it is only 30 cm from the next person’s POV. The Mona Lisa is photographed by every visitor to the Lourve when we have ready access to pristine images of her taken in optimum lighting etc.
We humans are strange creatures.

But the ubiquity of pocket-size video and point-and-shoot cameras is something we shouldn’t ever take for granted. It brings people to justice.

By now you may have seen the horrific footage of London police assaulting 47-year-old newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson, who was walking home from work by the g20 protests before he was attacked, had a heart attack, and died. (More.) The video was filmed by a bystander who “attended the protests near the Bank of England out of curiosity.”

While there was some whispering on Twitter and message boards that Tomlinson was beaten with a truncheon, until the video was released, his weak heart seemed to suffice as the cause of death.

hershman copy.jpgMost people generally trust that while authorities aren’t angels, they don’t act widely out of character. It just doesn’t make sense that they might beat, to the point of possibly inducing a heart attack, an old man who doesn’t even look like he was protesting anything. Well, now you can see for yourself.

If you are at all interested in the subject of sousveillance for human rights, take a look at WITNESS. The organization was founded in 1992, the year after George Holliday heard commotion outside his apartment and took his brand new camcorder to record police savagely beating Rodney King. The odds of having a camcorder on hand, (let alone at all) were pretty slim fifteen years ago. But today nearly everyone can document an abuse of power as it happens.

[By the way, Massachusetts has an obscenely antiquated law against what it calls "wiretapping," “intended . . . to prohibit all secret recordings by members of the public, including recordings of police officers or other public officials interacting with members of the public, when made without their permission or knowledge.” I believe New Hampshire and Pennsylvania have similar laws. Stupid, unjust, and yet on the books.]

Images from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Phantom Limb series.

Update 4/17/09: Very interesting response from William Shaw at RSA’s Arts and Ecology Centre blog: “having met Rodney King a couple of times while I was working in South Central Los Angeles, I wouldn’t envy anyone who becomes part of the info-maelstrom. The film of Rodney King’s beating became a focal point for civil rights activism, but King himself was not a man who ever asked for the attention, who felt tragically responsible for the deaths that happened in the ensuing riots, and who appeared to be just as much a victim of the all attention he had as of that original police assault.”

Posted by Joanne on Apr. 8, 2009 Tagged: , , , , , , ,

  • Great point. George Holliday used what I imagine was his relatively large, clunky video camera to record one of the major cultural moments of the 1990s in the US. We now have video cameras on phones, and the technology gets better every year. It does seem like this is a very good development for justice. I don't know if you saw it, but 60 Minutes had a shocking segment on a few weeks ago about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. With cameras everywhere, eyewitness testimony may become less and less relevant.

    This goes back to your original post about experiencing the world through our cameras: we're all becoming amateur journalists and publishers of media. When we blog about a major public event like the inauguration, we want to tell the story from our perspective even if there are thousands writing a similar account on their blog. Videotaping an event to share with our friends is just another way of doing this. The new technologies enables us to tell stories using multimedia and it's just not as satisfying to rely on other people to provide us with the material--pictures, sounds, words. Why we do this, I don't know. But, overall, it's probably a good thing that people are becoming more inclined to videotape their experiences, as the point about justice makes clear.

    Experiencing the world through video can be excessive, and it can separates us from the event we are witnessing, as you said. Of course, writing about events can separate us in a similar same way. Taking notes about an event we witness in order to blog about it later makes us a third-person observer as opposed to a participant. Maybe all of this is not a bad thing, but it is a change in the way we experience the world.
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