COVER STORY

In New Media, Image Is Still Everything

Will the age of YouTube and Twitter serve to restrain the impulses of repressive regimes?

by Paul Starobin

Saturday, Sept. 12, 2009


It now seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that a new age of participatory media is changing the world, and not least the world in which dictators and all manner of repressive regimes operate.

How profound is this new landscape -- in which cheap, anyone-can-use recording devices transmit vivid images around the world, crisscrossing high-speed communications networks for shared viewing by thousands or even millions of people? "It is unimaginable, had there been [personal] cameras in Auschwitz, that the world would have permitted the Holocaust to go forward," David Gergen, the CNN political analyst who worked in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton administrations, said in an interview. "We would have understood the face of evil."

Consider his point. The Nazis, no doubt, would have confiscated any image-taking device from their doomed prisoners. But what if a single "good German" -- just some grunt-level camp guard, say -- had shot secret video footage of an infant being sent to the crematoria? Or transmitted a photograph of the gas chambers across the Internet? Or webcasted pirated images of Josef Mengele's horrific "medical" experiments? Western Allied leaders, including President Roosevelt, might have found it politically impossible at that point to maintain their line that any effort to halt Nazi war crimes would only detract from the core aim of defeating Adolf Hitler's armies.

Of course, one does not have to go back as far as the Holocaust to consider the implications of the personalized image-sharing revolution. Gergen's "what if" question can also be asked about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. At a recent forum at the Paley Center for Media in New York City, Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit focused on alleviating global poverty, argued that the Hutu regime in Rwanda would have had a much tougher time whipping up a murderous paranoia had its people not been so isolated from the global media community. She noted that in the years leading up to the genocide, in which Hutus slaughtered a Tutsi population that they had been taught to hate, "there was no Internet, there was barely a television network in the country."

Proselytizers for the salutary effects of new media may be proved wrong, though, given the regular failure of all new technology, including television and radio in their infancy, to transform the worst features of humankind. Was Hitler's evil really so ill-understood, even absent graphic images to document his crimes? After all, by June 1942, The New York Times was reporting on "probably the greatest mass slaughter in history."

The age of participatory media has not, at least not yet, ushered in a noticeably less-volatile and -violent international climate. Still, no one can dispute that a new age has arrived -- much sooner than generally predicted and with important, if not easily discerned, geopolitical effects. The era has already spawned a student-led generation of human-rights-oriented "digi-activists," who lobby their targets, including Capitol Hill lawmakers, with homemade videos and other tools of their trade.

Some Washington policy makers, touting the freedom-spreading potential of online media networks, are pushing for U.S. funding of tools to prevent state censorship of the Internet. There is big game to be bagged here, virtual-style, advocates say -- the potential to bring down the rule of the mullahs in Tehran and the autocrats in Beijing, all without a shot from a single American gun. But skeptics say that Washington's fingerprints on anti-censorship tools would taint the activists who used them.

The media world, along with eternal efforts to manipulate that world for political purposes, is moving on, not just past the age of Walter Cronkite -- in his day "the most trusted man in America" -- but past a time in which any professional media outlet carries much weight or authority as a conveyor of images and other components of "the news."

The Post-CNN Effect

The dawning of the new age has been abrupt, more of a critical-mass kind of a leap than an incremental process. It wasn't so long ago, remember, that media analysts were pondering the so-called CNN effect "that continuous and instantaneous television may have on foreign policy" and "the conduct of war," as Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution once put it. The paradigmatic example, Hess noted, was the U.S. military invasion of Somalia in 1992, prompted by the images of starving children that were beamed by satellite around the world, and not least into President George H.W. Bush's White House. "I learn more from CNN than I do from the CIA," Bush declared.

The CNN effect also played into President Clinton's hasty decision, in the fall of 1993, to withdraw troops from Somalia, announced four days after Americans were infuriated by broadcast images of a mob dragging the bodies of two dead U.S. soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu. "Television pictures brought U.S. troops to Somalia, and television pictures will pull them out," the Africa editor of The Independent, a British newspaper, correctly predicted at the time.

These days, the media era defined by the CNN effect looks like a mere interlude, a way station to the customized media milieu that is supplanting the mainstream media. For one thing, CNN might just as well be called TNN -- Tabloid News Network. The company that made its bones covering such dramatic events as the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 now assigns a higher priority to covering global pop-culture celebrities than geopolitics.

In June, as street protests mounted in Iran against the apparently rigged re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, CNN at first was all over the story, with star anchor Anderson Cooper's AC360 leading with the Iran upheaval for five consecutive evenings. "Tonight, as we have every night, we are piercing the firewall the Iranian government is trying to build, taking you inside" the country, Cooper declared at the top of his June 17 broadcast.

But when Michael Jackson died on June 25, CNN, like other networks, shifted to wall-to-wall "Jacko" coverage; Cooper flew to Los Angeles to anchor the story. AC360 led with Jackson for 11 straight shows, the events in Iran no longer a central focus.

CNN was demonstrating its own shrunken stature. The mainstream television media's obsession with the Jackson story did not, in fact, stop interested folks from continuing to share images of what was happening in Iran. Even when CNN was paying close attention to Iran, the iconic image that the network broadcast to viewers, the grisly street death of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young female protester, came not from the camera of some intrepid CNN videographer but from an anonymous Iranian's mobile phone, an image that was posted within minutes on YouTube and Facebook. Neda thus became one of the first martyrs of the age of custom-generated, popularly shared images -- and she still represents a threat to the authoritarian regime of Iran's ruling ayatollahs.

The lesson is that repressive regimes can more easily block CNN's cameras than image-recording devices held literally in the hands of the masses. While CNN's Gergen stands by his network's editorial choices -- "they do a fabulous job in their totality," he said of CNN reporters -- he too concedes that a post-CNN media age has arrived. "Participatory journalism," he said, defines the new era.

"Participatory" is certainly an apt word for the new order, or disorder, of things, but the term "journalism" is debatable. In an age in which everyone can be a journalist, the traditional definition of journalism as an information-gathering/image-recording craft pursued by trained professionals is no longer operable. As members of Congress, among others, are discovering, the line between political activism and journalism is blurring in the "networked public sphere," a concept popularized by Yochai Benkler, a media theorist based at Harvard University. Indeed, as prime targets of a gathering wave of personalized-image lobbying campaigns, legislators will help determine the shape of the emerging media age.

Bearing Witness

Even on an image-saturated planet, Capitol Hill is subjected to an extremely intense level of bombardment. Images are ubiquitous on this turf, whether in the form of always-on office TVs tuned to CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC; videos streaming on members' and aides' computers and cellphones; or hordes of lobbyists and activists pushing multimedia presentations to make their case.

The Hill has seen nothing yet. Come the second Monday in November, a 1,000-plus-member battalion of student human-rights activists is planning to fan out to at least 100 legislative offices to deliver homemade video packages, each one uniquely tailored to fit the particular interests and concerns of the targeted legislator, all in support of a bill to strengthen the government's efforts to halt genocide.

The legislation is drawn from recommendations made by the Genocide Prevention Task Force, convened by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others, and chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Defense Secretary William Cohen. The lobbying effort is a partnership between Stand, the student-led division of the Genocide Intervention Network, a Washington-based grassroots activist group, and Witness, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit founded by musician Peter Gabriel to train and support local groups in using video technologies to spur action against human-rights crimes. (Stand is the evolution of a group founded as Students Taking Action Now: Darfur.)

Typically, video lobbying campaigns directed at Congress feature a generic packet of stock footage presented to each targeted legislator. The Stand-Witness collaboration, by contrast, will personalize this exercise. "It has never been done on this scale," Daniel Teweles, national student coordinator for the Genocide Intervention Network, said in an interview.

Witness experts are training the Stand activists, who range from high school to graduate students, on how to make a five-minute video. Each product will mix in images from the 3,000 hours of footage in Witness's digital archive. Depending on the history and interests of each lawmaker, this footage might focus on the contemporary crimes in Darfur or on the earlier evils in Bosnia, Rwanda, or the Holocaust.

The amateur videographers can pick and choose from resources on something called The Hub, "the world's first participatory media site for human rights," as Gabriel's group describes its online tool; it allows users to post homemade videos for sharing with activists, and anyone else, all over the world. In August, the "editor's picks" on The Hub featured Hear Us, a video of four Zimbabwean women attesting to the brutalities committed against them in the systematic campaign of rape, torture, kidnapping, and other violence that pro-government forces waged against the country's women in the contested 2008 national elections.

With this kind of footage as a base, the student activists will splice in video from interviews they conduct with VIPs in a lawmaker's state. The students might talk to, say, a minister, a mayor, or an important campaign donor. The main thing is to film someone whom the lawmaker knows and respects delivering a strong personal message in support of legislative action against genocide.

Stand's activists plan to distribute the videos to congressional offices by every means possible -- hard discs, USB thumb drives, e-mails with video links sent to a member's Facebook page. For the appointments scheduled on November 9, some of the students plan to come with digital-recording devices that will enable the member to stream a live video message back to constituents. To top it all off, activists are enticing MTV, the music video channel, which has taken an interest in student political activism and in human-rights issues, to cover the day of lobbying.

As this exercise shows, the new age of personally generated images is not just about the mass, yet indiscriminate, distribution of footage through pipelines such as YouTube. As the sheer volume of material increases, as the danger of image fatigue mounts, what really counts, in the thinking of groups such as Witness, is reaching a select audience in a compelling way. "Witness really focuses on which eyes matter, not necessarily the number of eyes," Chris Michael, a program coordinator for the Brooklyn group, said in an interview.

Tougher Times for Dictators

The history of American television networks is largely the history of brilliant visionaries, from CBS's elegant William Paley to CNN's irascible Ted Turner, who imposed their will on the world and became power brokers in their own right. The story of the post-CNN age of personally generated media, by contrast, is not the tale of larger-than-life personages but that of small people, ordinary folks, who have responded to circumstances that they probably never anticipated.

It is a bottom-up, organic story, nourished paradoxically by repressive regimes' attempts to control the old media. A defining illustration of this dynamic, foreshadowing how events would play out in Iran this year, took place two years ago in Pakistan.

In March 2007, the country's dictatorial president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, sought to preserve his rule by removing the chief justice of the supreme court. As Musharraf's position grew more embattled, he declared a state of emergency and shut down independent broadcasting channels.

Up to that point, Pakistanis had not distinguished themselves as sophisticated or ardent practitioners of online image-sharing and other forms of participatory journalism -- not surprising, perhaps, for a nation of 150 million people where only half could read and only about 17 million had Internet access.

But as a result of the "media vacuum" created by the government's throttling of the mainstream broadcasters, "alternatives began to flourish," wrote Huma Yusuf, a Pakistani journalist, in an authoritative analysis published by the Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The public realized that to fulfill its hunger for news in a time of political crisis, it had to participate in both the production and dissemination of information."

YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and other sites became integral to an intensifying protest movement that spread throughout the country and to the Pakistani diaspora. Student activists posted images of anti-Musharraf demonstrations on the Web; Facebook featured embedded clips of opposition leaders detained by his regime. The flames were fed by the assassination of Pakistani political leader Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi in December 2007. The defining images of that event were first captured by a Bhutto supporter and then circulated by a Karachi dentist, Awab Alvi, the operator of a popular blog known as Teeth Maestro.

It was the "citizen journalists" and their activist colleagues generating the images that CNN, the BBC, and other mainstream global news outlets relied on to present the latest news from inside the country. Musharaff's determined efforts to clamp down on the local digital media, including the Internet, were partly successful, but he could never fully stop the flow of images and other materials to sources outside the country.

In the end, his gambit failed. Musharraf had come to power in a bloodless coup in 1999, but he was eventually forced to surrender first his role as military leader and ultimately his position as president -- in part because he could not control the media as dictators had been able to do in the pre-Internet era. Score one for the digi-activists.

Should Washington Promote Participatory Media?

For some advocates in Washington, the revolution in personally generated images and other media is so important -- so vital to the abiding American mission of spreading freedom worldwide -- that they believe the government should back it with financial assistance.

Leading the charge on Capitol Hill is a pair of senators -- Democrat Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Republican Sam Brownback of Kansas -- who sit on the Senate State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Subcommittee, the panel whose jurisdiction includes the State Department's purse strings. Specter and Brownback have pushed through the Appropriations Committee $30 million in funding for the fiscal 2010 budget "to expand access to information and communications through the Internet," as the panel's report states. The money would be awarded to censorship-busting groups with a proven track record of "delivering access to large numbers of users living in closed societies that have hostile Internet environments."

The Specter-Brownback initiative has an intriguing -- and, not surprisingly, political--provenance. The proposal is backed by a nationwide network of human-rights activists, a number of whom are intensely involved in the struggle to combat Internet censorship in China. "We believe that the walls used by 21st-century tyrannies to isolate and control their citizens are increasingly electronic rather than physical barriers," the Coalition for Human Rights in Asia, a group of Asian-American activists, wrote in an open letter to Congress in May in support of funding of "Internet Freedom" tools. The letter was signed by leaders of groups focused on opening up the Internet in Tibet and countries that included Burma, Cuba, Iran, Laos, North Korea, and Syria.

Asked for background on the funding plan, a Specter aide referred a reporter to Michael Horowitz, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute and a veteran of international human-rights and American civil-rights causes. Horowitz is an adviser to a nonprofit coalition of human-rights groups and technology companies generally known as GIF -- an acronym for the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. GIF was created several years ago by Chinese-Americans associated with the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement persecuted by the Chinese government. The group has invented and promoted ingenious software programs that enable users in China and elsewhere to escape state-imposed restrictions on the Internet and gain access to blocked websites. The programs work by allowing users to, in effect, make it look as if they are accessing websites from Internet servers outside the country.

The GIF-created tools recently became highly popular among Iranians when Tehran tried to ban access to certain websites. But the remote servers on which the tools depend can easily be overwhelmed. That's why the Specter-Brownback proposal aims to bolster groups with U.S. funding.

Horowitz touts the proposal as a no-brainer for the Democratic Congress and the Obama administration -- a potential game-changer in the drive to bring societies such as Iran and China into the orbit of Western-style democracy. "This is the single most cost-effective strategy in the pursuit of America's national interest that I have ever seen," he said in an interview. Faulting the State Department for failing, so far, to get enthusiastically behind the funding plan, he added, "Barack Obama should be taking the mantle of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan as the man who tore down the walls of closed societies."

But some in the global human-rights community, when asked whether the American government should be directly funding the GIF programs and similar tools, answer with an equivocal maybe, maybe not. "There is a risk" that groups such as GIF "get too closely associated with U.S. foreign policy," Sam Gregory, program director for Witness, said in an interview. "It is generally not in the interest of human-rights groups to have the tools they create to be controlled by the U.S. government." His group, he noted, gets no funding from the U.S. or any other government; it is funded largely by foundations based in Europe and the United States.

"Controlled," in this instance, may be too strong a term--the Specter-Brownback plan does not envision a government takeover of Internet communications tools. Still, Gregory's caution is understandable. U.S. neoconservatives, in particular, have consistently failed to realize, in their quest to spread U.S. democracy, that Washington's imprimatur on a freedom-serving tool or tactic can rouse suspicion in foreign lands and even play into the hands of repressive regimes by allowing them to blame "outsiders" for meddling in their countries.

Skepticism abounds about the credibility of the United States as an actor in foreign countries, Mary Joyce, a co-founder of DigiActive, a nonprofit that helps train global human-rights activists in using online media, said in an interview. With respect to any Washington-backed program to combat Internet censorship, "anything that the U.S. could do would be encumbered by the views of the audience that the U.S. is trying to help," she said. Joyce, who is based in New Delhi, was the manager of new-media operations for Obama's presidential campaign.

Calling herself a "cyber-optimist," Joyce said she believes that, in the long run, efforts by regimes such as China's to censor the Internet are bound to fail, with or without Washington's involvement. "Filtering will be so ineffective that governments will stop doing it," she said, "and eventually citizens will win out."

The Specter-Brownback proposal's fate will hinge on support from power brokers such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose San Francisco district has a large Chinese-American population. Although Pelosi has a track record, dating back to the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, as a biting critic of Beijing's human-rights record, she has also displayed, more recently, a pragmatic willingness to temper criticism of the regime while seeking accommodations on climate change and other issues.

The debate over funding Internet communications tools shows that as the networked public square comes to be seen as a powerful political force in its own right, it will inevitably become subject to geopolitical calculations by the U.S. government and other prime actors. The debate reignites an eternal question of U.S. foreign policy: Should the United States openly crusade for liberal values, in this case risking the ire of regimes like China's by targeting their efforts to control their "information space"? Or should other political priorities dictate a less interventionist, more prudent, strategy? At this early juncture, the answer is unresolved.

The Image: Still Supreme

Is a more pluralistic media, haphazardly produced by a multiplicity of sources, a "better" media -- better, that is, for the well-being of the planet? The easy criticism is that citizen journalism and other varieties of online media production lack high standards, and so they do. For all of the mistakes that "elite" news organizations such as The New York Times regularly make, the errors are nothing compared with the casual misinformation and distortions that are a staple of the amateur news-gatherers and image-traffickers of the blogosphere. Indeed, one can safely predict that the number of hoaxes -- "news" events staged to capture global attention -- will increase with the widening availability of image-making technology.

In a widely noted testament to the power of the "social hallucinations" wrought by the age of personally generated media, Anders Colding-Jorgensen, an online media expert at the University of Copenhagen, managed to attract 10,000 Facebook group members in about a week to a fictitious cause to stop demolition of the Stork Fountain, a Copenhagen landmark, which in fact had never been slated for destruction. "We are a herd species," a blogger later commented about the experiment -- with less of a need for factual, literal truth than for the need "to belong to something bigger than us."

In this sense, the networked public square's ability to generate propaganda images for mass consumption may prove no less potent than the film and television industry's ability to do the same thing for a litany of 20th-century dictators. Probably the new era will produce no single work to rival Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 Triumph of the Will, the pro-Nazi film produced by the German propaganda ministry. Such big-ticket state-commissioned projects may be a thing of the past, but the ease of online media production may offer an even more poisonous media climate.

The video-based propaganda campaigns of Al Qaeda and other stateless terrorist groups, aimed at inspiring a global community of followers and sympathizers, may prove the start of such a trend. Anti-American websites trumpeted the 2002 video of Daniel Pearl's beheading, filmed by his jihadist captors and titled, by them, "The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl." Age-old ethnic and religious divisions, as in the Middle
East, may morph into virtual warfare between tribes of information warriors.

In the end, moreover, the images generated by citizen journalists and digi-activists may not turn the culture away from the tabloid style of presentation that has taken deep root in the mainstream media. The tabloid style is all about capturing the sensational in a condensed, raw form -- as easily done in an amateur's video snippet as in a photograph displayed on the front page of the New York Post.

Consider how the presentation of the death of Neda, the Iranian protester, has become an object lesson within the ranks of digital activists. "Neda's transformation from a person into a symbol" is "a story of citizen media," Mary Joyce wrote in a blog posting on digiactive.org, her group's website. "What are the lessons for activists who wish to use citizen media to frame a public issue? First, the media should be clear and emotional. Neda's video -- the most spreadable form of media about her story -- was raw and visceral. Without understanding the words of the men trying to help her or knowing much of the story, it was possible to empathize with her and feel the pain of her injustice," Joyce wrote.

In other words, Neda's story could be grasped without context -- which made it uncomplicated and easy to get, but also easy to manipulate and appropriate for political purposes. Media that are this unlayered may pull heartstrings but are unlikely to clarify the muddy waters of real life.

This seems especially true because the new era appears likely to reinforce, rather than challenge, the long-standing dominance of images, as opposed to words, as the main form of media content. The supremacy of "The Image," nearly 200 years after the invention of the daguerreotype and 100 years after the invention of television -- remains intact in the digital telling of stories such as Neda's. Yes, text-messaging via cellphones and word-driven technologies such as Twitter are significant features of the new media landscape, but nobody talks about "iconic" text.

The point is not that images are bad, but that they are easier to exploit for emotional purposes and easier to strip of illuminating context. Fascination with the lurid possibilities of homemade image production is so intense that personally generated, amateur pornographic images, freely shared on the Web, are eroding the profits of professional porn videographers and reducing demand for established industry stars.

Thus, for all of the promise of the age of participatory media, the new media world could yet turn out to be a lot like the old one. As ever, the question is how much technology can alter the human equation. What are people looking for as observers and participants in the networked public square? Do they want to be entertained, shocked, hypnotized, informed, enlightened? All of the above? Will they become inured to images of atrocity -- or perhaps distrustful of them, given the potential for fakery -- so that even genocide becomes no less frequent in this new age?

Now that the media is truly us, as both makers and watchers of the product, our future seems to rest on our eyeballs.

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