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.
Shaky, grainy, traumatic footage filmed on mobile phones wielded by brave citizens – from Burma to Tibet to Iran – has fast become both part of and fuel for contemporary narratives of uprising, struggle and repression – and it increasingly represents one of the key acts of resistance that individual citizens in repressive societies can make. While this now makes it seem almost commonplace in the rituals of human rights media, it wasn’t always thus.
I’ve been tracking, analysing and curating human rights video online for the human rights organisation WITNESS since the middle of 2006, initially via a blog aiming to unearth examples of activists using new technologies to document, expose and bring an end to human rights violations. A large number of stories were about mobile phone video – from police cells in Egypt to the execution of Saddam Hussein – and strikingly the most compelling, unvarnished and actionable footage often came from the cameras of the human rights abusers themselves.
Most of these cases showed networked technologies could reinforce repression – specifically taking mobile footage of humiliation, beatings, abuse, torture, happening in secret places, to show it directly to those you want to intimidate, and to circulate it more widely via Bluetooth “pour encourager les autres”. But in a certain number of instances case the videos found their way into the hands of outraged activists who spread and publicised the abuses online, to often global attention, with the long-term effect of focusing attention, activism, and advocacy to the governments tolerating or sponsoring these abuses, or at the very least, to undermine officially sanctioned or imposed narratives of law, order, justice.
A week ago I went to Human Rights Watch (34 floors up the Empire State Building) to interview John Biaggi, director of the organisation’s International Film Festival (HRWIFF). We cut a short version of the interview for the Hub a few days back, but I’m sharing the full 29′ interview here, as we weren’t able to include all the candid insights John gave into the changing nature of film festivals, the advocacy role that the HRWIFF plays in the human rights landscape, and the impact of the festival on Human Rights Watch itself.
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 »
A brief dispatch from San Francisco, where yesterday I spent some quality time with Loic Le Meur, Cathy Brookes and VinVin at Seesmic. As well as a quickfire exchange with users on Seesmic – some of whom are already on the Hub – Loic and I had a quick chat on Seesmic’s rooftop:
More soon on SF and LA (where I will be at the Media Re:Public conference at USC Annenberg tomorrow)…
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.)
Some of the top Kenyan bloggers have been providing compelling updates since the beginning of the election campaign – of those that I read regularly, Kenyan Pundit and Mental Acrobatics particularly stand out – and it’s worth keeping an eye on Global Voices’ Kenya Elections page. That said, we’ve been finding it difficult to track down much citizen video or audio at all from Kenya thusfar – if you come across any, or we’re missing something obvious, please let me know via the comments, or upload it to the Hub. I’ve been wondering why it’s taking time for video to emerge – is the footage out there, but just not online yet? Was it just too insecure and dangerous to film during the first few days? Here’s a by no means comprehensive scour for video, audio and photos out of Kenya in recent days…
It’s not quite clear to me whether this is related to an initiative by Media Focus on Africa, a Dutch-Kenyan NGO, equipped several reporters around the country with high-end video-enabled mobile phones – the reports on this site appear to end on 21st December, before the election.
Over at YouTube, another Kenyan online effort, Kenya Votes, conducted vox pops with ordinary Kenyans in the run-up to the elections, including this young woman expressing her fears about tribalism:
As you might expect, there’s plenty of traditional media coverage on YouTube – Kenya’s own Nation TV, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, and CNN are all putting video reports and interviews online. Rocketboom’s Ruud Elmendorp has a short video report from the days before the election. Currently individual users, like YouTube newbie theweepingsoul, seem to be using news images culled from the web in homages to the photojournalists and other journalists getting images out and in pleas to end the violence.
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