On March 3 1991, a manager at a plumbing and rooting company by the name of George Holliday awoke to sirens outside of his Los Angeles apartment. With the help of a Sony Handycam, Holliday began filming what would soon become fodder for national protests, riots and debates – the beating of Rodney King by multiple officers of the Los Angeles Police Department. After receiving unsatisfactory information from the police about why the star of his video was brutally assaulted, Holliday decided to bring the video to a local news station, KTLA-TV. The result of this decision, made by a manager at a small plumbing company who happened to be in the right place at the right time, have become embedded within history textbooks and racial debates ever since.

With the act of placing the Rodney King footage in the public sphere, George Holliday arguably became the first widely influential citizen journalist. By citizen journalist, I mean an average citizen, unaffiliated in any way with the formal institutions of journalism, who saw something of journalistic importance and took it into his own hands to distribute unbiased and reliable information on the matter.

What is critically important in the Holliday situation is the medium through which he reported the incident: live video of the incident itself. The old adage ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ holds a lot of weight. People tend to believe and deeply internalize something which they can see with their own eyes. By engaging the human vision apparatus, video footage of humans activates empathic responses within other humans. There is evidence to suggest that this is the result of the way we internally process vision. Psychological research points us towards the idea that we actually simulate what we are seeing within our mind as a core part of seeing – and if we are seeing a person we also tend to simulate what it would be like to be a person in their situation (i.e. empathy) [1]. This tie to emotion in conjunction with the fact that video is difficult to doctor believably, means that video can also be held to a higher standard of intrinsic truth than a traditional eyewitness report and therefore carries much higher amounts of persuasive information.

With 8 minutes of video at 30 frames per second, George Holliday was able to capture 14,400 images (or, if we accept the ‘image is worth 1000 words’ adage, the equivalent of 14,400,000 words or 163 copies of Plato’s Republic) about police brutality and racial injustice in America. 14,400 images which, in the absence of formal reporting, were previously available only to those living within the communities where such injustices were readily present.

George Holliday’s case represents the beginning of a fundamental shift in humanity’s storytelling capabilities. The importance of this shift cannot be understated enough. It is so important because such a shift changes who is able to tell credible stories. It separates reputation and public perception of a storyteller from the content of the story they are telling. For most of human history, one had to depend on the reputation of the author of a story to make a judgment about the credibility of the story they were telling. The journalism industry was built out of this need for reputation-based credibility. Such a dynamic also meant that unless one was in a position within society where attaining a position of credibility was possible, one’s voice could easily be muted by those who were already in such societal positions.

We now live in an age where this is no longer the case. According to a 2013 report on the mobile phone industry there are approximately 4.4 billion mobile phones equipped with cameras in the world [2]. Almost two thirds of the world now has the ability to create and disseminate reliable information in their pocket at all times. In this new age, one can have credibility without the need for reputation. Such a democratization of credibility will have profound impacts on how democracies operate and the power balances within those democracies by changing whose voice is perceived as credible.

In 2014, Eric Garner was filmed being choked to death by a police officer, sparking national outrage. The man filming the incident was Ramsey Orta – a man who would later face criminal charges for an incident of weapons possession unrelated to the Garner case. Yet, because the controversy around Eric Garner was based on video, Orta’s personal reputation is irrelevant to the story and Garner’s case remains one of the most irrefutable examples of American police brutality in recent memory. Contrast this with the Michael Brown case which occurred around the same time but had an eyewitness testimony that was quickly discredited by the reputation (and by extension credibility) imbalance of the witnesses arguing for and against the officer who shot Brown.

From Rodney King to Eric Garner, injustices are being exposed and brought to the public light by those who previously were not considered reputable enough for their testimonies to be considered credible. Citizen journalists now have the tools to irrefutably report on the world around them, regardless of their background or position in society. What this means for democracy is yet to be determined, but it is hard to believe that it won’t fundamentally shift the balance of power in democracies across the globe.

References:
[1] See simulation theory within the psychology literature
[2] http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/03/the-annual-mobile-industry-numbers-and-stats-blog-yep-this-year-we-will-hit-the-mobile-moment.html