21/06/2010 • 14:06 0
We’ve just released the latest joint YouTube/WITNESS blog post on our respective blogs, here and here. Take a look and let us know of resources we’re missing by commenting directly…
Filed under: Blogging, Cyber-Activism, Human Rights, Legal issues, Software & Tools, Sousveillance, Video Advocacy, cellphone, citizen journalism, internet, technology , safety, security
12/06/2010 • 21:13 1
Today, on the Google, YouTube and WITNESS blogs, I have co-written a new blog post with Steve Grove, YouTube’s Head of News and Politics. It’s the introductory post in a series about human rights and video, and sets the scene for why video – and citizen video – has become so integral to human rights advocacy work worldwide. Video has a particular and growing value in human rights work – it runs the gamut from evidence to emotion, from testimony to transparency, from social media to sousveillance – and it’s exciting to see YouTube giving this issue the space and prominence it needs, not least because YouTube is a key enabler and influencer of the human rights landscape, as Sam Gregory and I have argued increasingly vocally over the past year.
The remaining two posts in the series will offer first a practical run-through of how to create and share human rights video safely and effectively in the online environment, and then a piece looking at some of the ethical issues raised by presenting human rights videos online. Please do take a look at the outlet of your choice, and let us know what you think.
Filed under: Blogging, Cyber-Activism, Freedom of speech, Governance, Human Rights, Journalism, Mobile, Social Media, Video, Video Advocacy, cellphone, citizen journalism, internet, online video , burma, citizen journalism, google, Human Rights, iran, neda, technology, Tibet, Video, witness, youtube
22/04/2008 • 19:32 0
Brian Fitzgerald is Communications Manager for Greenpeace International – below he shares his reflections on the power of video to prod power and mobilise action. Naturally, his views do not represent the views of WITNESS (but we think they’re pretty interesting).
I remember the first time I saw video of whales being hunted. It was on the family television set — one of those old behemoths set into a piece of wooden furniture with gold-threaded cloth over the speakers, I guess in 1972 or 73. It was the kiss-off story, and Walter Cronkite commented on it with the only editorializing that hardened anchorman ever allowed himself, which was the inflection and tone he put on his signature goodbye: “And that’s the way it is…”
The tone, the eyebrows, and the pause he put around the phrase that night might as well have said “what is the matter with us as a species?” He couldn’t help it — the footage we’d just watched was an astounding piece of political activism, and his was the only reaction possible. It took something that was normally far from human view, the killing of whales, and it brought it into our living rooms. And it showed a conflict — a pair of Greenpeace activists in a tiny rubber boat, putting themselves between the harpoon and the whale — and challenged the viewer to choose a side. The implicit frame around that conflict was that one party was right, and the other was wrong, and you had to make a choice: Who are you with — the guy behind the harpoon, or those folks in the boat? I knew where I stood. So did enough people that a global movement to save the whale was born out of those images.
When I think about video as an activist tool, I think about a Quaker concept called “bearing witness.” It’s kind of a quirky concept, but here’s how it breaks down. If you witness a crime, you bear a moral responsibility. You can choose to act against the crime, you can choose not to. But if you’ve seen it and do nothing, you carry part of the burden of responsibility. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Human Rights, Video, Video Advocacy , activism, dove, environment, greenpeace, unilever, Video
13/02/2008 • 19:07 0
Head on over to the Hub (once you’ve read these great posts from Matisse and Sam, of course) for this week’s Picks… and see the end of this post for further links and info.
As well as images of continuing violence from the Rift Valley town of Naivasha, shot by our Kenyan partners Cemiride, we’ve also got footage from Licadho, a group that participated in last year’s Video Advocacy Institute (applications open for this year, folks…). Licadho’s short video, shot on a Flip camera, shows one example of the daily indignities suffered by residents of Dey Krahorm village in Phnom Penh “in a three-year campaign of harassment and intimidation of the community to coerce them to surrender their land to 7NG in return for new apartments on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, 20km away, or cash payments of far below the market value of the land.”
And after Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, gave a historic apology to the country’s indigenous communities, we have a video from EngageMedia taken on Australia Day, or what some have taken to calling Invasion Day, marking the impact of colonialisation on those communities.
Further links:
Keeping on the Australia theme, I like this audio/photo slideshow from the Sydney Morning Herald, which weaves together photographs taken of the stolen generations by the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board with interviews with some of the individuals depicted in them. It’s particularly interesting as an example of how individuals can re-appropriate their oppressor’s archival images of themselves and their histories. More to come on this theme later…
Cemiride // Licadho (background on the Dey Krahorm story here and here) // EngageMedia (Read Kevin Rudd’s historic apology. And if you don’t know the work of Swedish author Sven Lindqvist, you should. His latest book, Terra Nullius, takes his recent theme of European-driven genocides to Australia – read an extract here, et ici en francais.)
Filed under: Archive, Human Rights, Panel discussion, Protest, The Hub, Video, Video Advocacy , aboriginal peoples, archives, australia, cambodia, cemiride, elections, forced evictions, Human Rights, indigenous, kenya, naivasha, phnom penh, sven lindqvist
15/11/2007 • 20:35 0
Amnesty International’s UK section has released its Unsubscribe Campaign video, and it’s visceral and powerful.
Andy Carvin has an interview with the team behind the videos here (as Andy says on his blog: “Be forewarned that it’s very unsettling, and not at all appropriate for children.“):
Filed under: Human Rights, Video, Video Advocacy , advert, amnesty international, campaign, rendition, torture, unsubscribe me, viral
• 20:35 0
Amnesty International’s UK section has released its Unsubscribe Campaign video, and it’s visceral and powerful.
Andy Carvin has an interview with the team behind the videos here (as Andy says on his blog: “Be forewarned that it’s very unsettling, and not at all appropriate for children.“):
Filed under: Human Rights, Video, Video Advocacy , advert, amnesty international, campaign, rendition, torture, unsubscribe me, viral
11/11/2007 • 16:16 0
One of the things we’ll be releasing on the Hub in the coming weeks is a series of animated guides to video advocacy, along with downloadable PDFs. They’re based on our in-depth manual, Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (PDF) – which is also available in French, Spanish, Arabic and Russian. When the animations and PDFs are up, you’ll hear it here first.
Filed under: Human Rights, The Hub, Toolkits, Video, Video Advocacy
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