Abstract

Chat rooms can be highly toxic. They are the frequent haunt of trolls and spammers. This is especially true for chat rooms connected to live video streams. But chat rooms are also one of the only places where viewers can discuss what they are seeing in real time with a group of people who are all seeing the same thing. Communities form around chat rooms, and they sometimes develop their own unique culture and norms of behavior. This paper explores the problems and potential of chat. I will argue that chat is necessary but problematic, and will articulate a model of citizenship and community that could be built with the help of chat. I will survey existing chat moderation features on several platforms to analyze some of the technical solutions that are used today, and consider the importance of these features in positively influencing the tone and tenor of chat rooms. Finally, I will propose new features that might encourage vibrant, participatory, and civil communities around chat rooms.

Full Paper Here.

Recently the Guardian announced they were starting a campaign aimed at generating action on issues contributing to global warming. This is an interesting case study for digital activism for several reasons, one being that it is rare that a news organization publicly announces that it will champion a particular cause. If part of the current crisis in journalism is public skepticism about news organizations that try to adopt a neutral voice and are therefore perceived as inauthentic, this is a strong move toward open acknowledgment of what some view as a political position, and a move away from the long-standing ideal of “objective” journalism.

But beyond the novelty of a leading news outlet openly declaring an activist  agenda, what kind of techniques are being employed by the Guardian for this campaign, and how do these techniques compare to traditional organizing? The Guardian’s strategy in part is to leverage it’s reach (an estimated 42 million unique monthly visitors) to declare that climate change is a hugely important story, but one that is very difficult for news outlets to cover.

Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief wrote “The problem with this story is… it’s so big, and it doesn’t change much from day to day. Journalism is brilliant at capturing momentum, or changes, or things that are unusual. If it’s basically the same every day, every week, every year, I think journalists lose heart.”

So this is in part an awareness raising campaign. While the Guardian doesn’t necessarily intend to convince disbelievers, it does seem to hope that increased high-profile coverage of the problem will cause more people to take actions that could lead to policy change. Their main call to action is to increase participation in divestment campaigns. But the Guardian isn’t starting a new online campaign platform from scratch. Their online platform encourages people to sign a petition asking for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to divest from fossil fuel companies, but this petition is connected to 350.org’s ongoing efforts on this issue. Beyond petition signing, how do 350.org’s efforts compare to classic organizing techniques?

350.org’s technique is primarily to make it easier for individuals to engage in climate change activism by creating a variety of tools to assist the would-be organizer. They offer a suite of free resources, including templates for posters, sign up sheets, and talking points. They of course also push organizational updates through their email list. And they also offer guides to launching local chapters of 350.org. The website seems to suggest a three-tiered approach to accomplish this: meetups, workshops, and actions. Each of these activities is documented with suggestions and steps to be successful. As such, the broad 350.org strategy seems to be in line with traditional organizing principles: that activists need to make connections to people in their local area through regular meetings, and that systematic change can result from these activities. The online component is to offer free resources to help with offline activity, but the main goals are petition drives, group actions, and coordinated activity through local chapters. The Guardian and 350.org are therefore most fundamentally attempting to use their online reach to grow a network of people with the goal of increasing participation in these classic social movement techniques.

Promise Tracker is a tool predicated partly on the idea of participatory citizenship. It requires a group of citizens who have an area of interest that they want to document or poll people about. After creating a survey they must go out into the community and talk to people and collect evidence about their area of interest. After gathering this data they are able to use it to form a narrative that they can use to try to influence various levers of power. In this sense, one possible end goal for people using Promise Tracker is to change or influence existing systems.

As an example, a group of citizens might believe that Boston has allocated insufficient resources to snow removal, and that this insufficient government activity is creating dangerous situations for everyone. Promise Tracker could be used to create a survey that might include questions like “have you been endangered by snow conditions this winter?” and “has the city of Boston done enough to make roads and sidewalks safe this winter?” Teams could then move around the city and start polling people. In addition to the survey, Promise Tracker allows you to upload geotagged photos. If dangerous conditions were encountered while the teams were conducting survey questions, they could be photographed and uploaded to a map. Once the data was collected the group could then analyze the data and start to craft stories that use their new information. With those stories in hand the truly model behavior of participatory citizenship begins. The team would need to decide which institutions to try to influence. They might try to get stories in the press, or start attending city planning meetings to inform planners of their findings. They could also try to work outside of existing institutions, using the data and stories to try to mobile a direct action campaign.

But this participatory citizen model isn’t the only one that works with Promise Tracker’s strengths. If we perhaps stretch the conception of a dutiful citizen slightly to include the idea that being dutiful means holding government accountable or exposing problems, such a person would also find a lot of reasons to use Promise Tracker. A dutiful citizen might feel it is their civic responsibility to participate in the volunteer group described above. That person might feel that the city of Boston is not aware of the dangers posed by uncleared snow, and they have a duty to inform the relevant agencies. Or this person might feel a sense of duty to their fellow citizens. If uncleared snow really is a public hazard, then raising the public’s awareness of this may lessen the risks and harms created by the uncleared snow.

This example hinges on concepts of duty. As a counter-example, we can also imagine a dutiful citizen who feels that being dutiful includes trusting government to do what is right and what is possible based on their financial constraints. In this case, perhaps our hypothetical citizen looks at the snow problem and believes that being dutiful means having faith that the city is doing as much as it can to clear snow, and hazards will be cleared as soon as the hard-working city employees can get to them. “Duty” has shifted to mean dutifully suffering through dangerous conditions while waiting for the government to finish important work. Westheimer and Kahne argue that there is nothing inherently democratic about dutiful citizenship, which is true, but one can imagine two very different versions of the dutiful citizen, and each has a very different relationship to government and institutions: one who believes it is their duty to hold government accountable and inform it when then are problems, and one who believes it is their duty to trust government institutions and processes. In general, the ability to have faith in government seems to be waning in the US, and perhaps globally, but I do think there are still people who hold the later belief.

Creating an ideal inclusive civic technology is not easy. There are some questions that seem to require compromise no matter what the answer is. The use of anonymous or real names is one such question. Anonymity will generally encourage more people to participate, especially in places where the government may be monitoring citizen activity online. The trade-off with anonymity may be civility. The use of real names probably encourages more considered dialog because comments will be associated with someone’s real-life identity. In the choice between these directions I would generally come down on the side of anonymity, because dissenting opinions are more likely to be expressed. Anonymity is probably more inclusive in this sense, although it would be interesting to look at whether some people intentionally refrain from participating in certain civic technologies that uses anonymity because the discourse has become too uncivil.

Given the use of anonymity, are there other ways a civic technology can encourage civil discourse to ensure its inclusivity is not compromised by incivility? How are community norms set and maintained? The use of moderators is one way to encourage certain kinds of participation and discourage others. Livestream.com has a fairly developed chat system, which includes deleting or removing inappropriate content, banning users who repeatedly violate community norms, and even blocking ip addresses. Reddit offers another possible option for handling moderation: to actually post the rules for contributing to subforums. The tone and tenor of new civic technology platforms may be set by some of the earliest users, so thinking about inclusivity is something that needs to happen before a site is even launched. Perhaps “seeding” the discourse that happens on a new site could be an effective way to get things headed in the right direction.

Another factor that any civic technology concerned with inclusivity should consider is platform. While it is important to note that “digital divide” discussions also need to look at how people use the internet once they do have access, I would argue that a global view toward maximizing participation needs to take the mobile platform very seriously. Are we even possibly at a “mobile first” design inflexion? It appears that mobile has now overtaken fixed internet access globally. So if we are thinking about inclusivity, ensuring a solid mobile experience that is as light on data requirements as possible seems essential for those people who may not have easy access to fixed internet connections, or use prepaid data plans, as much of the world does.

A further design question around inequality might try to address the other side of the digital divide: how can a design process include consideration of differing levels of support, familiarity, and comfort with online tools and platforms? This might lead to a platform that has incorporated participatory design, or the designers might consider including less-skilled internet users in their early design and testing processes. For example, it would be interesting to look at how widely adopted the newest swipe gestures are. In the default iOS mail app for example, how many people actually use the pull left / pull right functionality? If those levels are low perhaps inclusive design actively avoids using these lesser-known gestures.

As a final though about constructing an ideal civic technology, one important component I would want to consider is fun. Civic technology sometimes deals with heavy issues. And not everything can or should be gamified. But if using a platform is actually fun, people are more likely to participate. Even a platform like SeeClickFix tries to make documenting problems fun through their systems of points and whimsical ranks like “digital superhero.” The Harry Potter Alliance might be another example, where fandom is used to encourage participation through campaigns like the “What Would Dumbledore Do” campaign. The “Israel Loves Iran” Facebook campaign is another example of using a sense of fun and appreciation to widen civic thinking. This might foster inclusivity in more subtle ways. Instead of feeling righteously angry after using a civic technology platform to fight the world’s injustices, what if users were left with a feeling of enjoyment?

These are just a few ideas to maximize inclusiveness. No one answer is sufficient, but a combination of reducing blocks to participation through consideration of identity and community, and with careful design centered on the facts of global internet access, plus a sense of making civic participation enjoyable, we might reach a broader group of people.

As the network speeds of a region’s cellular data infrastructure increase, so does the viability of livestreaming quality video from a mobile phone. From the US to Ukraine and beyond people are increasingly using livestreaming to document and report on local events. My final project will look at a subset of livestreamers, who I identify as “civic livestreamers,” and describe a new platform I have been researching and designing to augment and enhance their efforts to distribute information that is relevant to the public sphere. I will argue that current streaming platforms have poor viewing experiences, and that engagement and participation could be increased through re-imagining livestreaming from a civic perspective.

My final project will have several components, the first of which will be an analysis of how we might conceptualize the activities of these civic livestreamers. From the broadcaster, co-participant, and viewer perspectives, how does this activity fit with traditional conceptions of the media, professional journalism, independent journalism, citizen journalism, and documentary? Civic livestreaming is partly an act of disintermediation, as streamers refuse to cede representational and narrative authority to the mainstream media, preferring to create their own narratives and video footage. This view is supported through interviews with livestreamers and their statements on social media. In this sense civic livestreaming seems to be part of a response to the failure of traditional media outlets to cover certain events, or a dispute over how certain events are portrayed.

For co-participants, civic livestreaming is a more contested activity. There is concern that livestreamers may be informants (knowingly or unknowingly), and there is an unwillingness to cede narrative authority to a single co-participant. There is also some belief that livestreamers care more about their viewing audience than their co-participants and that they expose participants to greater risk of arrest. This complicates the civic function of livestreamers and is worth examining in more detail. Further research will also be required to understand whether a significant portion of viewers of civic livestreams are actively engaged in seeking out alternative narratives about an event, or if they are simply looking for the more immediate and authentic experience of an event that is enabled by livestreaming.

After looking at conceptual frames for civic livestreaming from various perspectives I will also consider how effective it can be at creating change. Part of this relates to the difference between having a voice and having influence or power. I will examine how civic livestreamers try to increase their influence, and whether there are examples of change resulting from livestreaming. Some of the influence or power of civic livestreaming may also be based on the possibility of documenting human rights violations. Is such documentation an effective way to create change?

A third component of my project will be a close look at existing streaming platforms, considering whether they succeed or fail in creating communities based on civic values and principles of the networked public sphere, including increasing participation, openness, transparency, and interaction. These same values will be used to discuss design principles and features of my proposed platform. As an example, interaction on existing streaming platforms like Livestream.com and UStream.tv currently consists of a chat window (if the broadcaster enables chat), a Twitter feed (also if configured), and the ability to share a url of the stream on popular social media platforms. There is also various social-media-type functionality built into these platforms, for example if users create an account, they can “follow” and “like.” As discussed below, my platform can incorporate these features, but also creates new categories of interaction and participation.

I will include a description and prototype of my proposed platform, which seeks to enhance the experience of watching a livestream by creating a way for someone to add relevant contextual information to a stream. This information might include tweets or hashtags, blog posts or news stories, maps or timelines for key events, or even music, images, or gifs related to the event. In this sense it creates a new role in the streamer-viewer ecosystem, that of the curator. I will examine the values embedded in this role, which includes extending the sphere of participation in a livestream event beyond what current platforms allow. Curators are likely to be people who are sufficiently interested in, and motivated by, the events in a civic livestream that they want to contribute to the public perception and discussion of what is happening beyond sharing it on social media. This creates an opportunity to participate in a meaningful way for people who are unable to join the event either because of physical distance or other reasons.

The design process for this website includes interviews with people who both broadcast and watch livestreams. In addition to seeking to understand some of the motivations for these activities, I will also ask some streamers to suggest specific features they would like to see, and what features they don’t like in existing platforms. Paper prototyping for the platform involved scenario-based co-design with two individuals. This falls short of a full participatory design process, and final decisions will be made by the design team, but it does value user input from an early stage and will incorporate user feedback throughout the design process.

Civic livestreams are an emotionally engaging way to watch important events, but the user experience on current sites is poor. There is limited opportunity to participate, streams are hard to find, and viewers often start searching for further information about the event shortly after they start watching, leaving the streaming site and browsing elsewhere. The platform I discuss for my final project aims to increase viewing time and viewer engagement by including an authoring platform where information can be added to a livestream. This creates the possibility of wider participation and increased impact. It also creates a more direct ladder of engagement for livestreaming, where people can move from being passive viewers to active contributors, even if they are not physically present where events are happening. It therefore promotes the ideal that anyone who can livestream can create their own narrative of an event, that this narrative can be amplified and supported by other people without mainstream media, and that people can thereby bring attention to events they feel are important, enriching the networked public sphere with new perspectives and information from events that mainstream media may misrepresent or simply does not cover.

SeeClickFix position themselves as a platform that facilitates communication between government and citizens. Their website states that “SeeClickFix is a communications platform for citizens to report non-emergency issues, and governments to track, manage, and reply–ultimately making communities better through transparency, collaboration, and cooperation.”

Looking at its functionality, the website incorporates elements of gamification by giving points to people for reporting, commenting and voting on issues, and displays point totals next to profile names in the “Neighbors” section. For positive reinforcement it assigns a whimsical “rank” based on point totals, such as “Digital Superhero,” “Municipal Avenger,” and “Civic Crusader.”

Signing up for the website reveals that user accounts are essentially anonymous – they only require an email address and a made up screen name. New users are also prompted for their nearest street intersection, but can click anywhere on a map. While anonymity is an effective method of “bracketing” identities and giving everyone an equal voice, it also makes it harder to regulate abusive behavior that could undermine the civility and effectiveness of the platform. Nancy Fraser’s critique of Habermas also raises questions about whether bracketing identity is a good thing by arguing for the importance of understanding someone’s lived experience to redress historical imbalances in power and communication flows.

In The Wealth of Networks Yochai Benkler describes of how the networked public sphere differs from the public sphere that was made possible by commercial mass media. He states that the qualitative change “is represented in the experience of being a potential speaker, as opposed to simply a listener and voter. It relates to the self-perception of individuals in society and the culture of participation they can adopt” (2). To apply this to SeeClickFix we would have to ask whether the platform encourages or allows more people to speak about community issues. On one level the website is essentially no different than calling up your local public works or transportation department. It does not create a new area of citizen/government interaction, it just moves an existing path of communication online.

Because user accounts can be anonymous, perhaps SeeClickFix is indeed a place where more people feel comfortable participating in the public sphere. Using the phone to call a city department may seem outmoded or even intimidating to some people, and caller ID may make anonymous calls impossible. Does this make the website successful in opening up the public sphere? One big constraint is how cities respond to problems. Boston and Cambridge are a good example. Boston appears to monitor the site daily and creates problem tickets in their own computer database for each problem. They report updates on the problem in the comments section. The City of Cambridge appears to occasionally lurk on the site. Occasionally they leave a comment, but it is unclear whether the website is an effective and consistent way to communicate with city employees.

Whether the website is an example of Tim O’Reilly’s “government 2.0” is therefore partly dependent on how specific governments treat the platform. Boston seems to monitor SeeClickFix constantly, so it probably does create an inclusive communication channel  to solve collective problems, especially with their policy of posting service request ID numbers and updating issues when they are resolved. But this doesn’t happen when a city like Cambridge seems to mostly ignore it or occasionally lurk.

But SeeClickFix doesn’t actually change the delivery model of government services. Government isn’t “a convener and an enabler” with this website. Government is not managing a marketplace, or using open standards, or building a simple system, or enabling data mining or experimentation. SeeClickFix takes the simple task of reporting a problem to your city and moves it online. This probably leverages the networked public sphere to create a more transparent and participatory process, but it doesn’t represent a radical rethinking of government, as O’Reilly urges us to do.

Some people used SeeClickFix to ask the community for help digging cars out of the snow. They generally got responses and people posted updates when the the problem was fixed. This type of ad hoc community help isn’t a use case the website designers probably planned for, but it does demonstrate the potential upside of creating a website for people who are interested enough in their community to report problems, and seems to be a real world instance of the “digital superheros” the site wants us to aspire to be.

Sometimes digital public spheres are built with the intention of democratizing what information gets prioritized by creating upvote/downvote systems that drive what information appears on the front page of a website. Such systems are generally viewed as fostering equality (everyone gets to vote on each piece of information if they want to) and openness or transparency (vote totals are usually displayed next to the items). It’s tempting to think of these platforms as a way to constantly poll the public about what is most important, and in turn to assume that the content on the front page is an accurate representation of what the entire community of users thinks is most important.

What might not often considered by users of these sites is the impact bad actors can have on these digital public spheres. From 2006-2010 Digg.com was a hugely popular social news site where users could vote links to news stories and other content up or down. It had over 30 million monthly visitors at its peak, before management and software problems led to its downfall. Most readers probably assumed that Digg’s voting system meant that the front page was an accurate representation of what millions of people thought were the most important links to follow for the day. Unfortunately that was not always the case. CMS alum Chris Peterson wrote his master’s thesis on the Digg Patriots, “a group of Digg users who coordinated to make the social news site more politically conservative than it would have been without their intervention,” which he describes as user-generated censorship.

Peterson explains their tactics: “By coordinating their activities they were able to quickly vote down left-leaning stories soon after they were posted, which caused the Digg algorithm to determine that the story was not worthy of the front page, even if it was voted up afterward They also ‘deduced that the Digg algorithm treated comment activity as an indicator of interest, pushing more active posts higher and sinking less active posts lower, so they developed a strong norm of not commenting on liberal posts while creating purposefully outrageous comments on conservative posts to bait liberal users into a frenzied discussion.’”

One of the problems this reveals is the possibly naive trust we place in the fairness of digital mediators. We know that the public sphere is a place where people vie for influence over one another. We assume that people use upvotes and downvotes to represent their own set of interests and to engage in influencing content. But we may also assume that because an “unbiased” computer program tallies the votes, the result is accurate, fair, and transparent. We don’t often consider whether a group or individual might be able to find ways to influence the digital mediators. Because it all happens in a black box, the typical end user only sees the content the users and algorithms push to the top. Auditing the algorithm or otherwise checking to see if it has been compromised by bad actors is basically impossible.

This is not to argue that such systems are bad, or even that they are inferior to other methods of establishing equality in a digital public sphere. But it does raise questions about how we negotiate trust with systems that are opaque to us, and what it means to create an expectation of equal representativeness in a digital public sphere.

I am left with several questions about these systems: how can we know how open, equal and representative any algorithmic system is (and any digital public sphere using algorithms to drive content ranking), and whether groups are succeeding in over-representing their interests? Does exposing an algorithm to public scrutiny simply make it easier to compromise, or is there a level of open source refinement that could actually make it less susceptible to the kinds of manipulations the Digg Patriots used for ideological ends? What does a set of best practices look like for people that have a genuine desire to create digital public spheres that are open, equal and representative?

One indicator of civic (and political) crisis beyond a U.S. context is post-election violence. It can be the result of many factors, including the expression of long-simmering tension between rival factions, anger over lack of economic opportunity, or a breakdown in trust between political or ethnic groups, especially if there are allegations of vote-rigging.

The 2007 post-election violence in Kenya is one example of this. After Mwai Kibaki declared victory, opposition leader Raila Odinga and his supporters rejected his declaration, alleging it was the result of rampant vote rigging. Violence erupted which resulted in over 1,200 deaths and 600,000 displaced persons. While a power sharing agreement eventually resolved the political dispute, serious questions remain for the country about how to heal the civic crisis. Much of the violence targeted ethnic groups. Kibaki is a member of the Kikuyu people and Odinga is a member of the Luo, and there were instances of members of each group attacking the other.

IRIN states that media was used to spread violence: “Inflammatory statements and songs broadcast on vernacular radio stations and at party rallies, text messages, emails, posters and leaflets have all contributed to post-electoral violence in Kenya, according to analysts.” Neelam Verjee states that mobile phones and SMS messages “were used to start rumors, instill fear, and mobilize perpetrators to violence.”

In the wake of this post-election violence several funders and NGOs have been working to build systems that could counteract these messages in the future. Sisi ni Amani-Kenya (“We are Peace Kenya” in Kiswahili) “uses mobile technology as a tool for civic education, civic engagement, and dialogue to help Kenyans realize their common needs irrespective of political divides.  We provide a neutral source of credible information and peace promotion. Rumors, misinformation, and confusion are key contributors to violence: getting people actionable information at the right time is crucial, and SNA-K’s use of SMS enables immediate, trusted and effective communication.”

Another example of using technology for civic renewal is Uchaguzi, a multi-organizational effort based on the Ushahidi crowdmapping platform to increase transparency and the flow of reliable information to respond quickly to problems. The Knight Foundation considered it a success when used during the 2010 referendum.

But how are these efforts contributing to civic renewal? Just as Johan Galtung differentiates between positive peace (the absence of structural violence, or the presence of social justice) and negative peace (the absence of personal violence) in “Violence, Peace and Peace Research” (1969), perhaps we should think in terms of positive and negative civic renewal. Negative civic renewal might therefore be defined the absence of civic decline. It would mean at least maintaining the status quo so that things don’t get worse. Positive civic renewal would be the active creation of new strong and weak social ties across rival groups resulting in an increase in trust. Thus when Sisi ni Amani attempts to counteract a call to violence over SMS, they are engaging in negative civic renewal. But when they work with community peace activists to help them spread their message across rival groups they are engaging in positive civic renewal. Both forms of renewal might reduce violence, but the long-term solution would seem to depend on positive civic renewal. Uchaguzi seems more oriented toward managing mistrust and making sure that problems are reported and rapidly addressed. Thus it may be primarily focused on negative civic renewal.

Ultimately, efforts like Sisi ni Amani and Uchaguzi that use media and technology to counteract messages promoting violence and increase the flow of reliable information are indeed examples of civic renewal in one form or another. By preventing critical breakdowns in tolerance and trust, Kenyans may be able to engage in what I am calling positive civic renewal, which is very similar to Robert Putnam’s description of rebuilding social capital. This entails re-establishing “social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.”

People who stream live video from their mobile phones can be a compelling example of citizen journalism. But it is not always clear if and when a live streamer can actually be called a citizen journalist. Just because someone pulls out their phone and starts streaming, does that make them a citizen journalist? It depends on what they are streaming.

I would argue that acts of citizen journalism can often be identified by asking the following question: is the person recording something in the public interest, with the goal of sharing it with an audience now or in the future? This is not meant to be an exhaustive definition, but it does seem to be a useful rule of thumb for articulating what activities might count as citizen journalism. For example, if you are at home and decide to live stream your cat, this almost certainly is not in the public interest. But if you are at a demonstration I would argue that you are indeed a citizen journalist because what you are streaming is very likely in the public interest, and streaming it demonstrates the intent to share it with an audience.

As an act of citizen journalism, live streaming has been especially compelling when used to document recent events in the US, including the community reaction in Ferguson after the grand jury decision was announced, and the widespread protests in New York after the death of Eric Garner. It is a unique medium because it is highly authentic, raw, uncut, and unprocessed. It allows the viewer to see events happen in real time through the eyes of a participant. In some ways it occupies the highest sense of technological immediacy which has resulted from faster internet speeds, pervasive data connection, and the increasingly sophisticated technology crammed into smart phones. It’s as close as you can get to being there without actually being there.

And apparently I’m not the only person who finds them compelling. Based on media reports and my own informal tally of view counts, within 12 hours of the grand jury announcement live streamers using UStream and LiveStream in Ferguson racked up 4.8 million views. New York Magazine detailed some of this activity, and some of the streamers, in an article entitled “Is Livestreaming the Future of Media, or the Future of Activism?” (Chen 2014).

Live streaming is also compelling because it is a textbook example of what Elihu Katz called disintermediation. It cuts out the middleman that is mainstream media coverage. The big news outlet coverage of Ferguson has been criticized for its lack of understanding of the community and their portrayal of events, not least by streamers and community members themselves. As Chen noted in the New York Magazine article, “The live-streamers’ other main adversary is the mainstream media. Many protesters in Ferguson can expound for hours about the problems with the media, from its obsession with ‘riot porn’ to its credulousness of the police perspective.”

In my personal experience, watching live video of Ferguson from a news helicopter circling overhead was almost completely uninformative. It told me nothing about what was really happening, and felt weirdly removed from the very real and important events that were unfolding on the ground. But watching people gathered in anticipation of bad news and listening to the announcement through the windows of a car, watching the community start to process what the decision meant, and watching people interact with police and each other through live streaming video was extremely informative and emotionally moving. Elise Thorburn touches on the difference is this perspective in her analysis of live streamers from the Montreal student demonstrations: “For those unable to attend the demos, for those at far remove from Montreal, or for those impeded by mobility issues or familial responsibilities, the live stream gave viewers insight into the motivations, ideas, analysis, and politics of the strikers and demonstrators; and these went far beyond the mainstream media’s reliance on government platitudes and shocking images of rioters smashing windows or running from tear-gas-happy police” (Thorburn 2014, 56).

I would also argue that streaming video (as well as recorded video) is increasingly thought of as a way to combat the growing power inequality between the state and citizens. There is a line of thinking that police are less likely to harm citizens, especially through the use of illegal force, if they are being recorded. Emily Bell notes that Ramsey Orta, who recorded the illegal chokehold used on Eric Garner, “said he always pulls his phone out if he thinks the police might arrest him, as protection” (Bell 2015). Michael Naimark asks “if a live webcaster knows the number of viewers in real time, could another Rodney King style beating be averted (‘14,556 people are watching you right now!’)?”

It is a very interesting question (for another blog post) as to whether the presence of video recording actually acts as a deterrent to police violence, or is an effective method of accountability when police violence occurs. This idea seems to be part of the Obama administration’s advocating for the use of body cameras on police. Here is one argument that camera footage as evidence doesn’t change the existing pro-police bias. Here is an argument that cameras can reduce abusive police behavior.

As compelling as live streaming video might be, one of the major challenges we face in this rapidly evolving landscape of citizen journalism is finding ways to help and protect live streamers. They are serving a vital function, often streaming from places where the mainstream media is unwilling or unable to go, but they lack all of the benefits that come from being a journalist with an institutional affiliation. As Bell notes, that includes pay, training, union membership, and the added protections that are afforded to the press. How can we properly thank or reward live streamers, and how can we make their cameras more effectively act as shields against state violence?

Bibliography

Bell, Emily. 2015. “Emily Bell’s 2015 Hugh Cudlipp Lecture – Full Text.” The Guardian. Accessed February 14. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/28/emily-bells-2015-hugh-cudlipp-lecture-full-text

Chen, Adrian. 2014. “Is Livestreaming the Future of Media or the Future of Activism?” Daily Intelligencer. Accessed December 15. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/12/livestreaming-the-future-of-media-or-activism.html.

Katz, Elihu. 1988. “Disintermediation: Cutting out the Middle Man.” Intermedia 16 (2): 30.

Naimark, Michael. “All Live Global Video.” http://www.naimark.net/projects/bigprojects/livevideo.html.

Thorburn, Elise Danielle. 2014. “Social Media, Subjectivity, and Surveillance: Moving on From Occupy, the Rise of Live Streaming Video.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11 (1): 52–63. doi:10.1080/14791420.2013.827356.