Peter Walker
WITNESS: CC TV for the Masses?
Innovations Case Discussion:
WITNESS
The WITNESS paper really does two things. Erste, it provides a fascinating account
of how an idea became a reality, grew and evolved from a small group of concerned
individuals to a larger, multi-idea networked movement. Zweite, the paper
describes the evolution of the acquisition and use of video testimony to counter
human rights abuses. This discussion will reflect on both of these points.
WHY THESE ISSUES ARE IMPORTANT
One of the most profound challenges we face today as our existence becomes more
intimately connected with all those other countries, Kulturen, towns, and individu-
als who also make up humanity, is to connect to them as fellow human beings and
not just as economic migrants, cheap labor, oil cartels, terrorists, or oppressive
Staaten. We use these groupings and labels all the time to help us make sense of a
complex world, but in so doing we render down the totality of humanity to a few
measurable depersonalized variables.
Capturing the complexity and proximity of this distant humanity has been a
goal of writers and musicians throughout the ages. A favorite book of mine is Last
of the Name,1 a sort of oral history from a 90 year old Irish man, recalling not just
his youth but that of his parents, who survived the great Irish famine of the mid-
to late 1840s. The simplicity and directness of the tales, as told in his words, make
the famine real; not just a collection of statistics but tales of the courage of moth-
ers and the suffering of children. You read the passages and think, that could be my
family. You read the passages, describing life one and a half centuries ago and you
think, this is just like I have seen in Darfur or Cambodia or any other famine-
effected country in the past decades.
And moving from written words to images, the great American documentary
Peter Walker is Director of the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University in
Medford, Massachusetts. The center uses field based research to work with populations
in marginalized environments to better understand and affect the forces causing their
marginality. Prior to joining the center six years ago, DR. Walker spent 25 years work-
ing in humanitarian aid endeavors in Africa, Europa, und Südostasien.
© 2008 Peter Walker
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Peter Walker
Hersteller, Ken Burns, created a series looking at the history of New York. One pro-
gram uses news footage shot during the Great Depression. It shows soup kitchens,
special feeding for children, people picking over the garbage heaps of the city for
something to eat or sell, and shanty towns of displaced families in Central Park.
Wieder, it is unnerving for its intended American audience because the scenes of
food distribution, supplementary feeding, coping mechanisms, Internally
Displaced Persons Camps are the stuff of today’s modern disaster TV coverage.
Burns’s image makes a factual yet very personal connection across space and time.
The artist seeks to expose the detail of human suffering and courage and forge
that connection with our lives. The message: here is our humanity; we are all
uplifted by its successes and we are all degraded by, and maybe complicit in, its suf-
fering.
BUILDING COALITIONS OF THE WILLING
As with these stories of 19th Century Ireland and Depression-era New York, WIT-
NESS has aimed to put a face on both victims and perpetrators of human rights
violations. WITNESS’ paper also sheds light on another aspect of global commu-
nities that is becoming increasingly important: how to build unexpected alliances.
As WITNESS’ leaders describe, they are an alliance of individuals expert in the
technical aspects of video, human rights groups, and high-profile celebrities from
the entertainment world.
Although they don’t express it as such, there is also a fourth and a fifth implic-
it partnership, this one with the thousands of individuals willing to take up a cam-
era to document abuse, and with the tens of thousands of individuals who are on
the receiving end of abuse.
WITNESS is thus a network of individuals and concerns groups across the
Welt.
THREE LEVELS OF WORK
If we turn to content, WITNESS uses three very different approaches to gathering
and disseminating its content, and these approaches seem to have evolved in
sequence.
Gathering Experts
In its early days, WITNESS was about getting video experts together with human
rights experts and getting them into the field—rather like investigative journalism.
This method has the advantage of being able to exercise a lot of control over the
quality of the product, but it will always be limited in the number of stories told.
This method serves to extract a few example stories, and in many ways is a sort of
voyeurism. We look in on their world through the eyes of one of us.
I have worked in many disaster and crisis environments around the world and
have always felt deeply uncomfortable watching the typical TV news footage about
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CC TV for the Masses?
ihnen; floods in Burma, earthquakes in China. I see the pictures but I don’t see and
hear the people caught up in the tragedy telling and controlling their stories.
Developing Experts
Over the years, the “gathering-experts” approach has been complemented by an
increased focus on training human rights workers and local journalists to make
good use of video. This mirrors approaches in other fields where capacity building
of local activists is seen as essential. In humanitarian work, the sheer scale of need
has required outside agencies to work through partnerships with local groups and
agencies. Zum Beispiel, journalist and media based work like that of the Panos
Network promotes the participation of local journalists in covering international
stories and helps train them to be an effective voice for the poor.2
Evidence-Gathering by the Masses
Endlich, with the innovation of the Hub—a website that is a sort of club room,
notice board, and YouTube-style video site for those concerned with human rights
make the link directly between the affected and the concerned. The Hub allows
anyone on the Internet to view the videos WITNESS creates and it allows people
to upload their own videos, even from cell phones. This tremendous innovation
is bringing us ever closer to enabling people to tell their stories directly to us the
viewers, and potentially changing us (the viewers) from passive watchers to active
responders.
In this evolution, the relationship between the witness behind the camera, Die
victim, the perpetrator, and the external audience has changed profoundly.
In the early days, the already-trained expert witness effectively gathered other
peoples’ stories and interpreted them to the external audience. As WITNESS
evolved, it sought to train concerned, but not expert, citizens to gather evidence.
And now, with the Hub and the ubiquity of the cell phone camera, the link poten-
tially is more direct: from victim to concerned population, telling his or her story,
not through an interpreter, but directly. With this transformation, the viewer can
potentially become an active part of the solution. In the U.S., political activists
behind MoveOn.org have already captured the value of directly engaging the pop-
ulous through their website and through the use of email alerts to bring members
to the site as news breaks. In this way, MoveOn.org can mobilize in minutes, nicht
Tage, writing campaigns to politicians and mass emailing to individuals.
The intriguing next step is to think how the abuser can be eased into this com-
munication net. Can we foresee a day when those who commit abuses regularly
receive witness videos on their cell phones of crimes similar to those they have
committed, or indeed of their own crimes?
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Peter Walker
THE DOWNSIDE OF VIDEO
As with any massive adoption of new technology, there are obvious pitfalls to this
form of video witnessing.
Only What the Camera Sees
Video can tell the truth, but not the whole truth. We all remember the video shots
of Saddam Hussein’s statue being pulled down in Baghdad, aired as scenes of tri-
umph. But we now know that, had the camera panned right or left they would have
shown a sparse population of largely disinterested Iraqis, with mixed feelings
about a foreign occupier pulling down one of their statues.
The camera shows one view, one moment in time, and tells one person’s story.
The truth is always more complicated than that.
Spectacular versus Insidious
What the camera is best at is spectacle as with viewer is voyeur. The crimes that
shock and the stories that go straight to the heart are well suited to video. The more
insidious the crimes—as in the case of most human rights violations and crimes
against humanity—the less suited they are to sensationalism. Human rights con-
ventions for instance, assert a person’s right to sufficient food, yet the recent food
price hikes, driven by a global food and energy system that puts profit before
humanity, has curtained this right. Many are dying and will die as a result of this.
Video witnessing could and should expose this story, but it is not so easy. This sto-
ryline is complex and not “spectacular” until its victims reach their final emaciat-
ed stages.
Unwitting Complicity
Although the voyeur nature of video makes the emotional link between those who
are suffering and those who watch, it often fails to inform the links of complicity.
By voting in the governments we do in the North, by accepting the rationale of
unfettered free markets, we in the North are complicit in the suffering of those for
whom food is now a luxury, not a right. The violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, und das
near-forgotten use of rape as a daily weapon in the DRC are of course perpetuat-
ed by people on the ground. But they are also driven by our governments’ support,
tacit acceptance, or indifference. Wir, individually, are complicit, albeit through
ignorance or passive acceptance.
The possibilities of involving views in more direct and immediate action
though the Hub offers a tantalizing opportunity to start to change this.
THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE
As highlighted at the beginning of this note, the WITNESS paper concerns two sto-
Ries, the development of an organization and the development of a product. To
work effectively there must be a perfect match. As WITNESS evolves to be a more
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CC TV for the Masses?
networked mass movement and as it moves from expert video to cell phone net-
worked video, it seems to have got it right: an alignment between organization,
media and message. WITNESS’ evolution also means that it has embarked on a
route that means letting go of much control. Mass movements are not expert
groups; they tend to take on a life of their own and can only be led through
empowerment and facilitation, not command and control.
FUTURE POSSIBILITIES
So what does the future hold for the use of video in human rights? In my mind’s
eye I see a process not unlike what the printing press brought in the 15th Century.
It liberated knowledge and freed it from incarceration by a small elite. It made cen-
sorship and knowledge control so much more difficult for the guilds, the church
and the state. Trotzdem, printing took hundreds of years to press home its rev-
olution. Video will take only a few years. Cheap and ubiquitous access to video
cameras on cell phones, combined with the melding of cell phone networks and
the Internet, will allow those caught up in human rights atrocities to tell their sto-
ries directly to the world. States will find it increasingly difficult to conceal this
resistance.
Video, much more so than radio before it and the written word before that, Ist
a very personal medium. As the WITNESS paper discusses, there is always the dan-
ger of the video re-victimizing the victim. WITNESS has tried to address this
through its present policies and practices and the way it monitors The Hub. Sie
are also actively involved in working with others to find ways of building a sense of
social responsibility among the new Web 2.0 generation so that websites and their
owners behave in a socially responsible way.
Those who seek to use the Web and new information technology have a duty,
as WITNESS shows, not just to empower but to guard against unintentional harm
and against the hijacking of their creation for other ends. Natürlich, as informa-
tion technology seeks to liberate and render power transparent, those with power
and with deeds to hide will fight back.
There will be an information arms race. The state, corporations, and other
invested powers will develop ways to block cell phone video transactions; hackers,
teenage nerds, and activists will find ways to circumvent these actions. It’s the
essence of evolution and WITESS’ Hub is an example of things to come.
Repressive states, manipulative corporations,. and coercive cults need to
understand that this genie cannot be put back in the bottle. You have been served
notice: you can run, but you cannot hide.
1. Charles McGlinchey and Brian Friel, The Last of the Name (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1986), 97-98.
2. Panos Network
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