I would suggest that we are now beginning to venture beyond our comfort zones, and begin to see new emerging participatory media models from completely different perspectives that are outside our own western frames of reference.
The questions and critiques coming up around both these organizational sites (…as aggregators, archives, people’s histories, video evidence) are valid when approaching and evaluating the work from a broadcast/consumer/audience model. However if you consider Witness and Engage as developing horizontal media networks for multiple uses, then these spaces become wide open for possibilities, disruptions, and new directions for journalists, historians and advocates to follow outside sanctioned pathways in volatile and complicated situations.
They become “useful.” For journalists to find out more, dig deeper and explore, perhaps repurpose and recontextualize material from a perspective far from their own. For individuals to learn ways to act as “citizens” with agency using these tools. For the voiceless to have an experience of having made their “invisible” issues visible. For humans to exercise their impulse to make their marks and connect to larger forces beyond themselves using media tools available (like mobile phones). For “voices” to cluster and form a new way of seeing the world and acting in it.
Yet. In this Economist article about Witness and citizen-based journalism, Visibility for All, the author looks at the pro’s and con’s of “video evidence,” and new software like the “Obscuracam” being developed by Witness to stay safe from the authorities, albeit temporarily.
Consider how Patricia Zimmermann frames the Engage Project:
EngageMedia operates within the contradictions between globalized development and environmental and human rights degradation in Indonesia. As EngageMedia’s Enrico Aditjondro, a trained journalist, has advanced, as new media technologies intersect with the current massive political and environmental challenges across Southeast Asia, the relationships between social change and social media are constantly realigning. Within Southeast Asia’s complex histories, political movements, and different relationships with globalization, the coupling of social media and social change in this region is variegated: uneven, productive, problematic, emancipatory, dangerous. As result, a singular, linear strategy for political activist media is neither feasible nor possible. In this volatile context, Aditjondro advocates for a more multiple, multi-faceted, multi-technological approach of creating microterritories for different voices through different strategies which he calls a gado gado strategy…
EngageMedia’s transposition of gado gado from cuisine to new forms and structures pushes documentary theory into new areas of permeable, participatory media practice, networked circulation rather than an image-centric practice, infrastructure capacity building, and polyphonies of mosaic structures…
… As a social media and capacity building organization and portal, EngageMedia signals the importance of moving new media and documentary theory towards a more shape-shifting, mutable, and adaptive a concept of permeable media straddling the online and offline worlds in networks of circulation.”
I do think as I read these theories and ideas about how Witness and EngageMedia work that I am finding how stuck I am to the ways I think about video production. I want to produce a piece that has my name on it. I want to work within the tradition of documentary filmmakers that have come before such as Fredrick Wiseman, Les Blank, or more recently Laura Poitras. I want to have a cinematic text that my film relies on. Though I don’t always think of what I am producing as useful, which is a key difference between the way I am thinking and how the directors and citizen producers at WITNESS and EngageMedia are thinking. The new space in which they are producing is founded on utility. It is all the tradition has known so far. That seems so nice to be freed from the goal of producing something to impress others.
I was struck by the last line in “Visibility for All”: “When all citizens are potential reporters, they risk being treated as journalists.” That’s a scary thought: Malefactors may strike against anyone who they think can expose them.
The article also brings up an interesting point about protest videos. Having just watched several, I can see how there would be pressure on video activists to go beyond the fuzzy, jerky shots of people chanting in order to shoot impactful video. It’s easy to see where this pressure can push activists inexorably toward mortal danger.
I also found it interesting to read about the “arms race” going on around video technology, where authorities are employing visual-recognition software, while activists are using technology to obscure identification. I wonder how the evolution of video technologies may affect the ability to prove authenticity. Is there any way to ensure authenticity when you can do almost anything digitally?
Having lived in Southeast Asia for 35 of my 38 years and working as a trade journalist for a few years in Manila, I am not so far out of my comfort zone in all of these. The relatively freer press there (I say “relatively” because despite the official policy of freedom in the press, there are still many unofficial perils involved) has led to the precocious development, as compared to neighboring countries, of citizen journalism there.
Citizen reporting has become standard fare in the evening news program and in the comparatively calm Philippine socio-political climate, they have come to perform a mundane but very useful function of serving as on-cam grievance help desks. Whether it’s petty extortion committed by a traffic cop or a busted water line that is being ignored by the local water authorities, the malfeasance or neglect can find its way to the evening newscast with the help of someone’s cellphone camera.
Talk about “creating micro-territories for different voices.” Can you imagine how many of those aggrieved voices would have been unheard in a “singular, linear strategy” of reporting? But notice that there is still some agency of traditional media (the TV news organization) involved in situations like these. They pass through some professional editing and content scrutiny before they are aired. I think this kind of gatekeeping is still very important, or maybe the word “facilitation” is more apt. Maybe that’s the direction where we, as professional communicators, are headed — to become more like facilitators than authors.
EngageMedia provides a globally-accessible repository for people to upload their stories, and submitters may understandably take gratification and affirmation in their ability to do so- especially where civil freedoms have previously been suppressed. Aside from being a cathartic exercise, submitting to EM allows members of communities (esp. marginalized microcommunities) to reflect on their identity, which, presented online, provides a sense of validation and permanence. These effects combine to cultivate perceptions of purpose, pride, self-determination, and civic responsibility among communities who upload- Zimmerman describes this as a “bottom-up” approach to building media presence in SE Asia among marginalized groups.
Build a sense of identity community is good, but I’m concerned that alone, digital tools like EM appear to promise more than they deliver. The site initially looks like an advocacy group, but absent the organization, context, and support provided by groups like WITNESS, I worry that much of the content on the site will remain stagnant and never reach beyond each independent micro audience. The internet is a new medium for many EM users, and it’s not hard to imagine that when hopes for outside help fall flat, content creators may be discouraged from further participation. While journalists, historians, academics, advocates, and other niche parties may seek out content like EM’s, it’s unlikely the causes presented will find the broader engagement necessary to effect change for each communities, as many of us have noted in our responses. The title ‘EngageMedia’ is unfortunately a plea rather than a descriptor.