Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

282 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubepolitics & human rights283ReferencesAufderheide, Patricia, Peter Jaszi and Mridu Chandra. Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers onEthical Challenges in Their Work, Washington D.C.: Center for Social Media, School of Communication,American University, http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/honest_truths_documentary_filmmakers_on_ethical_challenges_in_their_work.Gregory, Sam, Gillian Caldwell, Avni Ronit and Thomas Harding. Video for Change: A Guide forAdvocacy and Activism, London: Pluto Press, 2005. Also available at http://www.witness.org/videoforchange.Guerin, Frances and Roger Hallas (eds) The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and VisualCulture, London: Wallflower Press; 2007.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York UniversityPress; 2006.Kambouri, Nelli and Paolo Hatzopoulos. ‘Making Violent Practices Public’, in Geert Lovink and SabineNiederer (eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of NetworkCultures, 2008.Lessig, Lawrence. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0, New York: Basic Books, 2006.McLagan, Meg. ‘Making Human Rights Claims Public’, American Anthropologist, 108.1 (2006).Winston, Brian. Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries, London: BFI Publishing, 2000.Shooting for the Public: YouTube,Flickr, and the Mavi Marmara ShootingsElizabeth LoshIn contemporary English, to ‘shoot’ has two distinct meanings: to use a camera and to fire aweapon. Of course, this supposed similarity between media practices and military might hasa long rhetorical history, which is epitomized by lines such as ‘the pen is mightier than thesword’ or the phrase ‘this machine kills fascists’, once famously emblazoned upon the guitarof Woody Guthrie. It could be argued that the very term ‘tactical media’ carries similar connotations,suggesting an analogy between armed conflict and media gamesmanship fought,in the latter case, with cheap recording technologies, appropriated platforms, and viral onlinedistribution. These are weapons to be deployed in situations of asymmetrical warfare againstcorporatized anti-democratic entities, although theorists of tactical media are careful to distinguishtheir unstable, temporary, polymorphous allegiances from the bi-lateral conflicts associatedwith nationalism or the zeal of the global religions of the codex.The media deployed by different sides in these conflicts may have fundamentally differentorientations toward testimony and evidence. Competing campaigns by pro-Palestinianactivists and Israeli public relations specialists in the wake of the Mavi Marmara shootingsattempted to use video and photo-sharing sites as platforms from which to persuade a transnationalpublic. In the Turkish case, the rhetorical claims focused on testimony, in which aparticular political subject can bear witness as an individual agent. In the Israeli case, claimsemphasized the presentation of evidence in a seemingly neutral, technocratic display ofdisembodied objects, traces, and signs.In an essay on ‘Official Channels’ in the first Video Vortex Reader, I argued that the statesanctioneduse of YouTube in e-government in the United States and Britain tended to reinforcethe one-to-many structures by which liberal representative democracies functioned inthe mass media era and government norms of bureaucracy, surveillance, and legalism. 1Rather than celebrate the victory of YouTube’s DIY culture over corporatized neoliberal agendasof command and control, I asserted that the Staatswissenschaft of contemporary Achenwallscould just as easily borrow the trappings of vernacular video to co-opt the political willof citizens and further the data-mining of information on these citizens’ computers by thirdparties.Since then, modern states around the world have borrowed Anglo-American YouTube techniquesto buttress their authority. For example, a New York Times article from November1. Elizabeth Losh, ‘Government Youtube: Bureaucracy, Surveillance, and Legalism in State-Sanctioned Online Video Channels’, in Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds) Video VortexReader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, pp. 111-124.