We are what we see

JULY 11TH, 2016 — POST 189

If last week had any winner — and boy, that’s a hard ‘If’ to fathom — it was social media. The significance of Facebook Live video in the Philando Castile murder and now Periscope in DeRay Mckesson’s arrest during a protest in Baton Rouge has become so quickly solidified to make it almost trite to observe. Because, if you’ll recall, it wasn’t that long ago at all that Caitlin Dewey of The Washington Post wondered whether “raw” and “visceral”, promises of Facebook Live made by Mark Zuckerberg, is really what we want. Specifically pulling up cases of sexual assault and suicide streamed to both Facebook Live and Periscope, the argument put forward at the time was that Facebook and Twitter ought to shield us from seeing “bad stuff”.

Try to hold this position, or even one adjacent to it, today and you’ll be shot out of the sky. Casey Newton of The Verge this weekend positioned Facebook Live as “our new global distress signal”, implying the platform not only has inherit worth but access to it might just be ethically imperative. If any one video has made the “bad stuff” of Facebook Live a necessary evil it was the video shot by Diamond Reynolds of her boyfriend Philando Castile’s last moments. The video that was watched more than 5 million times, even if the vast majority weren’t actually watching live, joined the videoed murder of Alton Sterling from earlier in the week to serve as a flashpoint for protests: one which resulted in 5 police officers gunned down by sniper fire. Critically, at every point of inflexion, a single smartphone camera routed through a social conduit to millions of smartphone screens.

Beyond the events of last week, Newton’s piece hits on one transcendent moment:

“And even when social media did upend regimes, during the Arab Spring, we looked upon it with pride as a validation of Western values — with little thought for what those tools would expose at home.”

The technology upon which movements in the Arab Spring were founded was short strings of text, instant messaged or tweeted. Nimble chunks of sentences around which groups could quickly rally and disperse when needed. The notifications that would ripple through a community on each individual’s smartphone was spoken of not merely as “Huh, would you look at that?” but rather as a fundamental mechanic of survival. If Newton’s observation can serve as predictive, what text was for those in the Middle East, video — live video — will continue to be the most necessary resource in the mobilisation of people, most potently deployed in response to violence. The more views a video of a black man killed by police gets, the more people will show up to protest, the more smartphones will sling effortlessly from holsters to capture more video.

The status of live video compounds this effect. Because live video says something specific: this is happening. Sometimes the implication of past tense, “this happened”, provides just enough distance, just enough of a temporal crack from which ignor-ance can sprout. Even if it was shot yesterday, whatever horrible act is presented onscreen, it isn’t happening now. It isn’t upon us, beating down, forcing us to encounter it. “It happened, it sucked, what else is on?”. Even when a video is watched after-the-fact, as with Diamond Reynolds’, it bears live’s aesthetic ticks, the extended black frame when the camera was covered, the unshakeable sense of liveness that compels action. Live proves the world sucks right now, as you watch.

As Twitter became a civil service for those in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, Facebook Live too becomes the most compelling animating principle by which change can occur. This is as much of a technological moment, as much an aesthetic moment, as it is a civil, social, and political moment. Whilst there is undoubtedly much hand-wringing inside of Facebook’s boardroom about the tool’s power, especially as the company more than ever just wants you looking at photos of your friends, they would be unwise to make any changes. Some “bad stuff” will get through, but people’s lives might just depend on it.