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TechnoratiBearing Witness 2.0: You Can't Spin 10,000 Tweets and Camera Phone Uploads
China just delivered a stunning, real-world demonstration of the changes rocking -- and transforming -- modern journalism.
When deadly riots broke out in the western province of Xinjiang last week, the Chinese government sprang into message control mode. It choked off the Internet and mobile phone service, blocked Twitter and Fanfou (its Chinese equivalent), deleted updates and videos from social networking sites, and scrubbed search engines of links to coverage of the unrest. At the same time, it invited foreign journalists to take a tour of the area.
That's right, it slammed the door in the face of new media -- and offered traditional reporters a front row seat.
China's leaders realized that it's one thing to try to spin the on-the-ground views of bused-in reporters ("To help foreign media to do more objective, fair and friendly reports," in the words of the government's PR agency), but quite another to try to spin the accounts and uploaded images of tens of thousands of Twittering and cell-phone camera-wielding citizens.
The Chinese have clearly learned the lessons of Iran.
The same can't be said about New York Times columnist Roger Cohen who, writing about covering the Iran uprising, recently claimed:
To bear witness means being there -- and that's not free. No search engine gives you the smell of a crime, the tremor in the air, the eyes that smolder, or the cadence of a scream.No news aggregator tells of the ravaged city exhaling in the dusk, nor summons the defiant cries that rise into the night. No miracle of technology renders the lip-drying taste of fear. No algorithm captures the hush of dignity, nor evokes the adrenalin rush of courage coalescing, nor traces the fresh raw line of a welt.
How bizarre is it that Cohen chooses to attack the tools of new-media-fueled reporting by citing the very event that highlights the power of those tools -- and the weakness of his argument?
Indeed, search engines, news aggregation, live-blogging, and "miracles of technology" such as Twitter, Facebook, and real-time video delivered via camera phones, played an indispensable part in allowing millions of people around the world to "bear witness" to what was happening in Iran.
The truth is, you don't have to "be there" to bear witness. And you can be there and fail to bear witness.
Obviously, there is tremendous value in being an eyewitness. But we have to always keep in mind that the conclusions drawn by eyewitnesses are greatly influenced by the eyes doing the witnessing.
Malcolm Muggeridge famously called this "the eyewitness fallacy" -- the tendency of people to see, in eyewitness accounts, what they want to see.
As a longtime writer and editor for the New York Times, Cohen should be particularly aware of the limitations of eyewitness accounts.
"Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, [a scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade] pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection." So wrote an embedded Judith Miller, "bearing witness" to the "silver bullet" proof of Iraqi WMD in the Times in April of 2003.
Miller was certainly there to vividly describe "the tremor in the air, the eyes that smolder." And her account feels so real. But it was oh so wrong.
Miller was hardly alone in seeing what she wanted to see when it came to Iraq. On-site reporting, as Cohen notes is not free, but, too often, neither is access. Bob Woodward wrote two books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack, that, in retrospect, glaringly demonstrate the sometimes-high cost of access. Woodward got his eyewitness scoops; the White House got a portrayal of Bush as a scrupulous, honest, highly moral leader. It wasn't accurate, but it sure was a pretty exclusive eyewitness account. It wasn't until a third book, ironically with much less eyewitness accounting, that Woodward belatedly began getting the Bush presidency right.
Another example of the limitations of Cohen's credo that "to bear witness means being there" comes courtesy of his fellow Timesman, executive editor Bill Keller. Three days after the fraudulent Iranian election, and well after the street protests had been revved up and hundreds of videos had been uploaded and thousands of tweets had been posted, Keller -- in Iran to "bear witness" -- reported:
"With this election, Mr. Khamenei and [Mr. Ahmadinejad] appear to have neutralized for now the reform forces that they saw as a threat to their power, political analysts said."
Not exactly a miracle of eyewitness reporting.
In his column on Iran, Cohen writes movingly about being torn when he was forced to leave: "We journalists are supposed to move on. Most of the time, like insatiable voyeurs, we do. But once a decade or so, we get undone, as if in love, and our subject has its revenge, turning the tables and refusing to let us be."
I share his love for impassioned journalism, the kind that earned Upton Sinclair, I.F. Stone, and George Orwell their well-deserved place in history. But this is precisely the kind of journalism that is so often derided and dismissed by those who think the function of journalism is simply to offer up both sides of a story or an issue and then get out of the way.
Cohen says he has left a "chunk" of himself back in Tehran. We should all be leaving chunks of ourselves behind when we encounter not just people demanding their freedom abroad, but those here at home who are losing their jobs, who can't get health insurance, and whose houses are being foreclosed. And we should leave a chunk of ourselves with them not just once every ten years, but every day.
New media is not replacing the need to "bear witness," it is spreading it beyond the elite few, and therefore making it harder for those elite few to get it as wrong as they've gotten it again and again -- from Stalin's Russia to Bush's Iraq.
29 Comments so far
Show AllThis article leads me to reflect on the character and utility of the ‘witness’ as such.
We must now, perhaps, as was certainly equally prudent in the past, reflect on the quality of knowledge derived from witness, to be sure, but also the significance of these visual testimonies and written accounts, and whether they contribute to our knowledge and our witness, or to something else. We as consumers are now delivered and sold the witness which we crave, but at what cost? Do we stop to consider the context in which we are placing ourselves or the ambiguity by which our witness is colored? Do we acknowledge that authenticity may be as duplicitous as production-value? Essentially, is it technology that is facilitating a new potentiality, or is this new potentiality making an already dubious product more of a commodity—cheap, atomized, and superficial? And is this commoditization leading unreflective consumers into the trap of its authenticity, just as the former administration supposedly was lead toward its ignorant beliefs concerning the intelligence regarding WMD?
We must question the underlying materialism that this article omits. Are we to offer our ears and our eyes to these reports because the reporters, like ourselves, have camera phones and computers, to which we can relate, which are compatible with our unstated preconditions upon credulity and trustworthiness?
In fact the word ‘witness’ derives from the Greek ‘martys’ or martyr, which had originally a secular meaning in addition to its religious connotations in the Old Testament and the New Testament. There are ancient historical sources (e.g. Josephus) which inform us that these martyrs, especially lower class witnesses, “were tortured routinely before being interrogated as a means of forcing them to disclose the truth.”
Certainly, this ‘Witness 2.0’ is a far cry from that. In the ancient sense, witness was a burden and a trial, a condition whose qualities inherently exposed the individual to the methodology of power to elicit “the truth”—in a very real sense victimizing the witness. The question which this leads me towards is the following: is it the quality and utility of witness which is changing, or the methods with which power finds it effective and convenient to elicit its preferred testimony?
The conclusion that the elections in Iran were fraudulent seems to me like the sudden revelation of a tortured witness: far too certain, and far too consistent with what the authorities suspect.
President Obama has successfully switched Bush's short and midium term oil grab strategy in Middle East, West and Central Asia to a slower cruising speed. It is time to put the old "Good terrorist and Bad Terrorist" strategy into prominence once more.
Rebiya Kadeer, the president of World Uigur Congress was arrested in Xinjiang earlier on but was released to USA in a deal struck with Washington betwwen the American and the Chinese governments. She now received aids from the American National Endowment for Democracy. Her extensive power and influence extend to the Anti Chinese Uigur organisation in Germany (Germany has a sizable community of immigrants from Turkey. The Turks, who originally came from Central Asia, claim the Uigurs as a branch of their ancient tribe). Together with President Erdokan of Turkey, she charge the Chinese government with genocidal policy against the Uigur Chinese.
The 5th of July incident was a well organised and well timed terrorist attack on the Han Chinese civilians by the Uigur Chinese terrorists. The object was to incite a retaliation by the Han Chinese civilians against the Uigur Chinese civilians and to bring about racial riots spreading to other parts of the Xinjiang Province of China.
If the Chinese authority had allowed free flow of information through Twitter, electronic short messaging, and internet transfering of videos taken with handphones, hand held cameras and cine-cameras etc, the instigation and spread of racial riots would have come about according to the terrorists' plan.
That is why I said Arianna Huffington's sermon is for the "Birds" (rumour-mongers) and for the Bird Brains. I shall refraim from calling her a accomplice in the attempt to spread the "Pentagon's Democracy".
Firstly , if the Chinese and Iranian governments can shut down communications as they did, it can defiantly be done in America.
Second, the major media in this country is involved with covering up all of whats being done in Washington everyday.
There is very little coverage of the war in Afghanistan.
There is little reporting on the Dick Cheney pack of lies, he did not keep us safe. He knew of a possible terrorist attack on August 6th 2001 , and did not have his first Terrorist threat meeting till Sept. 10 2001. Wow. thats interesting. Meanwhile George was in Florida 25 miles from centcom, reading to 5 year old children.
Tell Liz Cheney that her Haliburton/KBR trust funds are solid.
She does not have to worry about a penny , even if her daddy goes to jail.
So stop being his parrot.You will have the nation hating you next.
Now , lets talk about the nation wide stazi police network that Bush/Cheney built using their cronies and the extreme right wing evangelicals.
I have been a victim of extreme right wing gang stalking community watch stazi torture for 2.7 years.
I know who the players are, and they have tried to tone back the overt nature of their torture do to the election of Obama, but make no mistake about what I am about to say.
This is a government run program, nationwide, built to provide 24/7 ground surveillance. These people and company's have signed loyalty oaths to a government that was using fear mongering , money , and the patriot card.
Their goal is to have a stazi , nation wide network of warrant less surveillance torture freaks that are not accountable to any laws.
Now , that said , is it any wonder that warrant less surveillance is permitted and that immunity has been granted for all those involved.
Mean while , I am dying a slow death from the 24/7 torture,they have done great damage to me, and my family, and I cant drag any of them into court because of their immunity.If I won the lottery in Florida , I would never make it to Tallahassee with my winning ticket, of that I am sure. Thats how well they watch me, tap my phones and listen to my home conversations.They know when I leave the house and where I am going 24/7. This is one very sick group to torture gang stalking freaks, dont move to or visit Bradenton Florida, if you step on the wrong toes down here, you will be followed and tortured the rest of your life.
And they know it, so every time I blog , they make me pay.
Where is the justice department, and the Supreme court now.
They executive is calling the shots, I sure as hell did not like what Busch/Cheney did to this country, I sure these right wing militant christian torture lunatics wont like whats coming next from the Obama administration.
Accountability, where and who got money. Was it spread around.Cause thats whats going to happen next, Obama will get money to his constituents, no more free ride to christian extremists.
Just as well , since we are going to allow warrant less surveillance, you might as well have left wing gang stalking groups spying on right wing gang stalking groups.
Fair is Fair.
One thing does bother me , when will it end and who will be left standing.
Thats why warrant less surveillance is a cancer that will destroy our country.
I am not afraid of terrorists, we have plenty of guns and people willing to fight, but a government that is in everyone's business by using a stazi network??? Well , thats something to be afraid of.
I recall the old adage.. the winners basically write history...
However, the "new media" has the potential to change all that by instantaneously bearing witness from those who are actually EXPERIENCING history to report and give primary source material.
Journalism was always secondary source material.. always has the potential for bias and observation rather than BEING part of the event that is unfolding. And when you get parent companies that are dictating what you can report and editors changing what is being reported... and reporter who are viewing through biased lenses.. you are not going to get accurate accounting's either!
While I think Twitter is stupid.. overall... and confusing.. (I think first hand blogs are better).. it still is part of a change that is encouraging to see and it is distressing that China continues to censor..
the Revolution will NOT? Be televised.. how bout twittered?
"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity" Horace Mann First President of Antioch College.
Few people understand calculus, and few people understand the science and math of statistics..... what I am trying to say is that in any situation, many random samples must be taken to reveal the truth of the situation. I am neither a 'tweeter' nor a reader of conventional news sources, so I have to admit, I have no idea what happened in the Iranian election, nor in China. We need many reports from many perspectives to know the truth or gist of the situation. So, IMHO we need 'tweets' from the street and real reports from journalists (do they actually exist in the 21st century?) to understand something happening half a world away.
"we need 'tweets' from the street and real reports from journalists"
And it would help if everyone were driven by an agenda of world solidarity, instead of the usual "what's in it for me?"
Isn't there kind of a funny thing about media? People watch and listen to what they want to watch and listen to. If they're bored or something more interesting comes along, their attention follows. Advertisement therefore controls the press, as the press needs to sell to stay in business. Therefore whatever news gets consumed the greatest by consumers is also the news that gets the most press attention.
Long ago it was discovered that media was critical in shaping public opinion. For those who want to shape public opinion, this means going where the people are. And here is where the funny part happens. Let's say you try to get heard by starting your own radion station, but no one listens and it goes out of business? Now what? Go after whatever the people ARE watching in order to try and shape their opinions. Go after them rudely and forcefully, if need be. And so the comedy of activists trying to get heard continues.
"New media is not replacing the need to "bear witness," it is spreading it beyond the elite few, and therefore making it harder for those elite few to get it as wrong as they've gotten it again and again -- from Stalin's Russia to Bush's Iraq."
Great article Arianna.
If Mrs. Huffington is willing to sponsore and organise three or four hundred terrorists to set vehicles, shops and shopping malls on fire, to stone, club,slash and stab people indiscriminately in the streets and in their homes, it is a lot easier to organise a few hundreds "non-violent protestors" to Twitter, E-mail and post messages and video to support their violent and rampaging conspirators.
If you are as enthusiastic as Mrs. Huffington about Twitters and such you are in the good company of "birds" ("birds" as in "A little birds told me...In other words, rumour-mongers),and bird-brain
??
Huffinton did not sponsor the violence but the USA did. Nakli confirms what I surmised from the USA sponsored terrorist actions in Iran immediately prior the elections and the propaganda spin the USA was fed by the MSM and certain unnamed websites. The reality of the Iranian riots have been submerged by the USA propaganda blitz that blinded so many "progressives" . I suspect Nakli is a Iranian witness to the riots.
Probably a troll, don't bother. Never seen the name before.
The international community only declares an election invalid if the fraud changed the outcome of the election.
A certain website full of pro Musavi propaganda linked to videos with a byline of police brutalty when in fact the videos showed, rioter violence, arson and explosion at a shrine.
The President of Twitter said on NPR authoritarian regimes are going to have a tough time now that Twitter is in town.
If everyone is Twittering about a CIA organized demonstration it sure ain't promoting democracy.
Twitter Creator On Iran: 'I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful'
SAN FRANCISCO—Creator Jack Dorsey was shocked and saddened this week after learning that his social networking device, Twitter, was being used to disseminate pertinent and timely information during the recent civil unrest in Iran. "Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them," said a visibly confused Dorsey, claiming that Twitter is at its most powerful when it makes an already attention-starved populace even more needy for constant affirmation. "When I heard how Iranians were using my beloved creation for their own means—such as organizing a political movement and informing the outside world of the actions of a repressive regime—I couldn't believe they'd ruined something so beautiful, simple, and absolutely pointless." Dorsey said he is already working on a new website that will be so mind-numbingly useless that Iranians will not even be able to figure out how to operate it.
Gotta love The Onion :-)
Bearing Witness 2.0: You Can't Spin 10,000 Tweets and Camera Phone Uploads
YES WE CAN!
Fuck this 2.0 shit (that's so last century)
the US had stolen elections in 2000 (don't forget!)
2.0 didn't do shit to stop it
China does very well keeping it's slaves in line. Even so, it looks like cracks are beginning to form in its oppressive armor.
another lesson to slavers everywhere. especially if you're trying to enslave a population with at least a rhetorical committment to revolution. the chinese are not shy about upheaval. as it turns out, neither are the uigyrs (sp).
but it's also another lesson to those who import massive amounts of labor from the outside into economies that cannot sustain the influx. the result is almost always what the chinese would call "disharmony".
i'm incrasingly wondering what a map of the world will look like in a century (aside from the absenc of current coast lines...:)) back to tribalism?
You have to love the lede of this piece. The content proves the point completely wrong. Or to paraphrase our friends in the Dem party: Yes, we can! (spin 10k of twitters and phone cams)!
If anyone would know, it would be the celebrity dolts at HuffPo.
The US has murdered somewhere between 10,000 and 1,000,000 in Iraq. It has created millions of refugees in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Where in the hell is the twitter, the text messages, etc. This twitter BS happens when the CIA and Mossad want it to happen.
Somebody monitored the Twitters during the demonstrations in Tehran- all thousand or so- they turned out to have the usual twitter contents ( inane personal comments of no political importance). The notorious "censoring" of the internet seems have been primarily a technical problem- overload combined with minimal capacity. One might expect that this is the case in China as well. But in both cases, and in others such as Hondorus, only certain classes of people have access to the modern "miracles" of modern communications.
Not that censoring doesn't take place or that their is no political repression going on. Still, it is important to put these practices in perspective and to wonder whether the same ends couldn't be as easily achieved without them...as we do in America, where a consensus has arisen that somehow the elections wwere "rigged" rather than just a big disappointment for those who lost.
A Huff
A dispenser of her own skewed brand of PopProp.
"Three days after the fraudulent Iranian election,..."
- Would you care to share your proof of fraud in the Iranian election Mrs. Huffington? To be sure the vote was not counted with 100% accuracy but there's no evidence that Ahmadinejad didn't win by a substantial margin.
"New media is not replacing the need to "bear witness," it is spreading it beyond the elite few, and therefore making it harder for those elite few to get it as wrong as they've gotten it again and again..."
- I'm still waiting for your proof, Mrs. Elite Few...,,, err.,,..I mean, Mrs. Huffington.
I second that, Cygnus. Our dear readers might also like to know that the Uihgur (sp?) uprising in China, like the Iranian election protests, has the NED's fingerprints all over it. This from Newsweek, no less:
"On Sunday, bloody race riots erupted in Urumqi, the capital of China's Xinjiang region, where the Muslim Uighur population is the biggest ethnic group. Announcing an official death toll of 156, Chinese authorities have blamed the violence between Chinese and Uighurs on leading Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer, an elfin grandmother with gray-tinged pigtails who was released from a Chinese prison in March 2005 and immediately whisked into exile. A former millionaire once praised by Beijing as a model businesswoman, Kadeer now lives near Washington D.C. and recently published Dragon Fighter, an autobiography. She is recognized as the leader of the Uighur exile community and heads the Uyghur American Association and the World Uyghur Congress; both groups receive grants from the bipartisan National Endowment for Democracy funded by the U.S. Congress."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/205830
Cohen sez: "To bear witness means being there ..."
***
I know the focal range only of my own cell-phone camera ... but I'm trying to imagine how anyone can get a useable image from one of these things without being THERE.
That's true...and I suppose the main reason there is such a thing as journalism, to put facts and events into context that people can understand. It's similar to how intelligence is produced. Raw facts and information by itself can be far too confusing to act upon.
If all the witness-bearing, twittering, and youtubing is so effective at getting around the elites, then why the dramatic difference in attention to the twittered and youtubed protests against a suspicious election result in Tehran, and the even larger protests against an an outright military coup in Tegucigalpa?
It seems the elites still have a very large role in determining worthy from unworthy victims and their protests to me...
All the twittering and youtube videos in the world will just fall in the the vast sea of internet anonmynity, without the elites pointing attition to them first via their mass-broadcasting ability. They still control the information that controls popular opinion.
Thank you. This is exactly what I have been trying to point out since the coup in Honduras.
The only answer I can come up with is this: what happened in Iran the US didn't like; what happened in Honduras the US did. There is no other explanation.
Yes, and an even larger picture: what about our own fraudulent elections and electoral system? Will this be viewed as critically as those "other countries" (with or without twitter) in 2010 or 2012?
Actually Twitter could be perfect for this. Instant, global reporting of any voter suppression or election fraud at any poll in the country.