Social Media and Civic Journalism Critical Essay 1) Read articles and watch videos 2) Explore grassroots social media organization, blogs or twitter/Faceb

Social Media and Civic Journalism Critical Essay 1) Read articles and watch videos

2) Explore grassroots social media organization, blogs or twitter/Facebook site for news/politics

3) Write a critical essay focusing on analyzing and examining social media site for civic journalism or news. Critically analyze and explain emerging challenges, promise and pitfalls of social media on news and civic engagement. In doing so, incorporate all the readings and videos.

4) You should include the cite of articles in the course and at least two outside sourse. One of the primary goals for this assignment is to demonstrate your understanding for the module articles. Make sure you cite them as necessary but avoid excessively long quotes in a short paper like this. By all means, paraphrase and then give citations.

5) MAKE SURE YOU PROVIDE A REFERENCE PAGE IN APA STYLE.

Articles

1. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obam…

2-5. in the files

Videos

1.

2.

Rubric

There is a well-developed introduction with an attention grabber that grabs the reader’s interest and continues to engage the reader up until the thesis statement. The thesis statement should clearly state the experience or event that will be described as well as the effect on the writer. Conclusion should effectively wraps up and re stresses the importance of the thesis.

Well developed main points/topic sentences that relate directly to the thesis. Supporting examples are concrete and detailed. The analysis is developed with an effective point of view.

Logical Progression of ideas with a clear structure that enhances the thesis. Transitions are effective and vary throughout the paragraph, not just in the topic sentences. Writing is smooth, skillful, and coherent. Sentences are strong and expressive with varied structure. Diction is consistent and words are well chosen. Punctuation, spelling, and capitalization are all correct. No errors.

Essay follows/addresses the module assignment instruction/guidelines exactly as requested: these includes page lengths, font, size, spacing of paper, specific instructions on case studies that need to be examined, or essays that need to be cited, number of references, questions asked from the instruction as well as expectations for each assignment explained in the video clip. 489863
2013
NMS16510.1177/1461444813489863new media & societyAndén-Papadopoulos
Article
Citizen camera-witnessing:
Embodied political dissent in
the age of ‘mediated mass
self-communication’
new media & society
2014, Vol. 16(5) 753­–769
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1461444813489863
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Kari Andén-Papadopoulos
Stockholm University, Sweden
Abstract
This article interrogates the emerging modes of civic engagement connected to the
mobile camera-phone, and the ways in which they require us to rethink what it is to bear
witness to brutality in the age of fundamentally camera-mediated mass self-publication.
I argue that the camera-phone permits entirely new performative rituals of bearing
witness, such as dissenting bodies en masse recording their own repression and, via
wireless global communication networks, effectively mobilizing this footage as graphic
testimony in a bid to produce feelings of political solidarity. Critically, the performance
of what I elect to call ‘citizen camera-witnessing’, as exemplified by contemporary street
opposition movements including those in Burma, Iran, Egypt, Libya and Syria, derives
its potency from the ways it reactivates the idea of martyrdom: that is, from its distinct
claim to truth in the name of afflicted people who put their bodies on the line to record
the injustice of oppression.
Keywords
Citizen journalism, crowd-sourced video, digital activism, media witnessing, Neda
Agha-Soltan, social media, the 2011 Arab uprisings, transnational protests, usergenerated content, visual culture
In our rapidly evolving mobile recording culture, some of the most nodal images of critical news events have been created by average citizens and other non-conventional actors
(Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti, 2011). Examples abound where individuals have
Corresponding author:
Kari Andén-Papadopoulos, Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, PO Box 27861, 115 93
Stockholm, Sweden.
Email: anden@jmk.su.se
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new media & society 16(5)
generated eyewitness imagery of vital significance for global audiences, such as during
the September 11 attacks (2001), the London bombings (2005), the anti-government
protests in Myanmar (Burma) (2007), the post-election protests in Iran (2009), and the
Arab uprisings (2011–2012). The mobile camera-phone, as a wearable extension of the
self that is uniquely and intimately connected to global digital networks, has afforded
individuals an extraordinary networking power they have never before enjoyed (e.g.
Castells, 2009; Reading, 2009). Hence, ‘ordinary’ people – including local residents,
holiday makers, soldiers, democratic activists, insurgents and terrorists – are now enabled to bypass established editorial and censorial filters and turn their personal record of
an event into a public testimony that might disrupt ‘official’ perspectives carefully crafted
and provided to the mainstream news media.
Specifically, in recent years we have seen the emergence of the new powerful figure
of what I elect to call the citizen camera-witness. The term refers to camera-wielding
political activists and dissidents who put their lives at risk to produce incontrovertible
public testimony to unjust and disastrous developments around the world, in a critical bid
to mobilize global solidarity through the affective power of the visual. Street opposition
movements in particular, including those in Burma, Iran, Egypt, Libya and Syria, have
demonstrated the distinct moralizing force of photographic and videographic testimony
that features the mobile witness’s mortal engagement with the event accounted for. They
have done so in the face of brutal state repression and also in contempt of state security
forces proven effective at tracking down dissidents using the internet and cellphone surveillance (e.g. Morozov, 2010). The powerful ability of this imagery to affect audiences
worldwide owes, I argue, in a significant measure to the way it resonates with, and reactivates, the idea of martyrdom. ‘Within every witness, perhaps, stands a martyr’ writes
Peters (2001: 713), and the self-representations by contemporary political activists are
certainly expressive of the will to use pain and the body to convict the conscience of the
viewer. It is no coincidence, then, that a recurring visual trope in citizen-produced
imagery from zones of conflict or crisis is to zoom in on the blood spilled by the local
person-on-the-street or even by the videographer him/herself. A case in point is an amateur video from the post-election protests in Iran that shows a group of men carrying a
wounded man down a street in Tehran.1 The footage is blurry and jerky, the videographer
evidently moves around as he is filming. Suddenly, the camera zooms in on dark red
bloodstains on the ground and, next, the videographer demonstratively holds up his own
bloody hand in front of the lens. ‘Look’, the theatrical gesture seems to say, ‘I am testifying to the unjust power of the Iranian regime, to its brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters, with my own blood’. The physicality of witnessing thus takes centre stage, with the
pained body of the videographer-witness showcased as a criterion of truth and
credibility.
A key challenge in the new global media ecology is to make sense of the emerging
modes of civic expression and engagement connected to the mobile camera-phone, and
the ways in which they require us to rethink what it is to bear witness to brutality in the
age of fundamentally camera-mediated mass self-publication. To what extent do these
novel imaging practices constitute a new kind of witnessing: one that, in turn, forges
new points of connection and emphatic engagement between ‘us’ and suffering ‘others’
in the global mediapolis? My article analyses some of the ways in which the massive
Andén-Papadopoulos
755
demonstrations and modes of resistance of our time have given force to the (audio)visual device of the mobile camera and, simultaneously, how the activation of this apparatus indeed becomes a part of the scene or action, complexly entering into and conditioning
the different trajectories of the conflict in question. As a point of departure, I argue, we
must recognize how the conditions of the post-2001 global ‘visual economy’ bring forth
what has become the very entry card to presenting oneself as witness today: graphic
imagery that bears the mark of incontrovertible truth. This circumstance, I further suggest, is precisely what has allowed today’s camera-wielding citizens and activists to
reclaim the ‘field of witnessing’ as Ashuri and Pinchevski (2009) term it. They do so
through the ritualized employment of the mobile camera as personal witnessing device
to provide an authoritative record of lived bodies obstinately and publicly reasserting
their right to assemble in the face of deadly state violence. Citizen camera-witnessing,
then, has proven to facilitate connectivity with and action on distant suffering precisely
by its distinct claim to truth in the name of afflicted civilians who are recording their
own repression.
The rise of a post-2001 global ‘visual economy’
Images have always played a pivotal role in the conduct of war and peace, and in shaping
public understanding (and later memory) of critical events. Yet, a new regime of public
imagery appears to have emerged in the wake of the image-event of September 11 in
which visceral images create spectacular events as much as they record them. Today,
ways of seeing and the ‘realities’ of geopolitical intervention are in part constituted in
and through each other (i.e. Campbell, 2007; Guerin and Hallas, 2007; Kennedy, 2009;
MacDonald et al., 2010; Mirzoeff, 2005). This transformation is, as Mitchell (2011: 2)
notes, ‘a matter of both quantity and quality’. The development of new mobile media
means that the number of images has increased exponentially along with their mobility
and mutability across different mediascapes. However, we are not simply talking about
more images but about ‘a war of images in which the real-world stakes could not be
higher’ (Mitchell, 2011: 2). Today’s wars and political conflicts are to an unparalleled
extent being fought on behalf of, against and by means of ‘radically different images of
possible futures’ (Mitchell, 2011: 2). The image wars of the 21st century have thus
expanded beyond television, print and film to online social networking sites such as
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. This new ‘wild zone of representation’ has become a
key battlefield of contemporary political struggles, allowing for previously disenfranchised forces to take on an important role in the production and contestation of geopolitical power.
The prevalence of contemporary image wars further suggests that the notion of visual
economy (Poole, 1997) is more useful than the idea of visual culture for thinking about
the global systems of interconnection and exchange within which visual images operate
today. The word economy implies that the organization of the field of vision ‘has as
much to do with social relationships, inequality, and power as with shared meanings and
community’ (Poole, 1997: 8). The idea of a ‘visual economy’ also signals a shift from an
understanding of visual images as illustrations and carriers of information to an appreciation of their power to enact and perform in the social field; that is, to ‘bring the objects
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they purport to simply reflect into being’ (Campbell, 2007: 379). It thus highlights the
ever-increasing power of images and their circulation to shape the collective imaginary
of global populations and structure relations of geopolitical power.
Citizen camera-witnessing
Recent years have seen the term ‘media witnessing’ emerge as a way to elucidate how
modern audiovisual media now make the experiences and realities of distant others
available to mass audiences, turning us all into witnesses of sort. In the seminal definition provided by Frosh and Pinchevski the term refers to ‘the witnessing performed
in, by, and through the media’ (2009b: 1). However, while the literature on media
witnessing interrogates the intricately tangled issues of what it means to ‘witness’ in
our age of global media reporting, there is a lack of clarity regarding the use of terms.
As Sue Tait (2011) observes, the conflation of eyewitnessing and bearing witness is
endemic to the field, as is the cutting of ‘witnessing’ to refer to either concept. She
argues that a distinction must be made between these concepts in order to elucidate
the ways bearing witness extends beyond seeing through practices that are affected,
partial, active and, fundamentally, committed to an ethics of responsibility.
Following Tait, then, I argue that it is critical to distinguish between mundane acts
of recording (more or less) banal moments of our daily lives and the embodied risk
of filming as resistance to brutal repression. The former category of eyewitness
remains only that: a mere spectator who does not necessarily attempt to communicate anything. In the latter case, the eyewitness responds to a crisis by performing an
act of bearing witness that appeals to an audience. Granted, none of these categories
have clear boundaries, and one often begs the other in the escalating public documentation of events. Still, an analytical separation must be made so as to account for
the ways that performances of mobile witnessing exceed the simple act of recording:
the former invoke an explicitly moral practice, which is normatively linked to pain
and death (Peters, 2001). It is precisely the affected and affecting embodied subject
who may stake his or her life for testimony that constitutes what I here term the citizen camera-witness, as opposed to the category of the mere eyewitness. I also conceive of these imaging practices as citizen camera-witnessing to link them to the
political notion of citizenship (as in ‘citizen media’ and ‘citizen journalism’).
Complex as it is, citizenship presupposes engagement with civic affairs and suggests
the modes civilians follow to connect to the sphere of politics and public affairs
(Papacharissi, 2010). Certainly, mobile media have not only enabled the intended
and accidental recording of public and private events by both professional and amateurs, journalists and citizens, but they have also brought on an increased blurring of
these distinctions (e.g. Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010). Nonetheless, the strategic
use of the mobile camera-phone by civilians on the street for advocacy purposes and
goals of change is increasingly noticeable. This, then, is what defines citizen camera-witnessing: the ritualized employment of the mobile camera as a personal witnessing device to provide a public record of embodied actions of political dissent for
the purpose of persuasion.
Andén-Papadopoulos
757
Ways of witnessing
Frosh and Pinchevski (2009b: 3) point out that the rise of ‘media witnessing’ coincides
with what has been termed ‘the crisis of witnessing’ (Felman and Laub, 1991) in the
wake of the Holocaust. At the core of the discourse of the Holocaust witness is the
impossibility of bearing witness: the traumatic event inhabits the extreme zones of
human imagination of which we cannot (or should not) speak. Moreover, it poses as the
true witness not only those who were there, in person, but those who were on the ‘right’
side: the survivor, the victim-witness who bears the imperative of speaking out against
evil and injustice while being subjected to the wrongdoing thus exposed (see Margalit,
2002). Essentially, the contemporary scholarly debate about who qualifies as a witness
turns on the imperative of speaking out against unjust power and, even, on the martyrological notion of self-sacrifice as the ultimate mark of a moral and trustworthy witness
(Peters, 2001; Thomas, 2009). In the tradition of Christian martyrology, the term martyr
(‘witness’) refers to someone who is called to witness for his or her conviction, and who
suffers pain and death in consequence of this testimony. The irreversible fact of bodily
suffering and death serves as a guarantee of the authenticity of the words of the witness,
and also gives irrefutable credence to the righteousness of his or her cause (Peters,
2001: 713). Fundamentally, theorists of media witnessing diverge on the issue of
whether modern mass media can sustain the long-standing, embodied ethical and cultural practice of witnessing and, by implication, if home audiences indeed can make the
grade as full witnesses. In his landmark essay on witnessing, John Peters refutes Ellis’
(2000) – and others’ – notion of witnessing at second-hand, that is, under the conditions
of mediation, narrowing the parameters of who constitutes a witness to bodily presence,
risk and trauma.
The contemporary citizen camera-witness can be seen to directly invoke the discourse
of Holocaust witnessing and ‘the enduring moral centrality of its foundation in embodied
experience’ (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2009b: 13): if today’s street opposition movements
are essentially a form of political dissent that ‘places lived bodies in tension with the
prevailing social order’ (Koukal, 2010) this is also to say that the moral claim of camerawielding citizens documenting their own repression lies precisely in their mortal – and
presumably righteous – engagement with the event accounted for. In cases such as
Burma, Iran, Egypt or Syria, civilians en masse have put their bodies on the line, filling
streets and other public spaces to obstinately make a shared stand against military dictatorships or tyrannical regimes. The legitimacy of the state is brought into question precisely through bodies that come together in the square to seize upon and re-invent the
space of politics.
Yet, the Holocaust discourse is limited when theorizing what it is to witness in the age
of the camera-phone and the internet, insisting as it does that bearing witness is fundamentally about (the inability of) putting into words the experience of a traumatic reality.
Today, bearing personal witness to public events has not only become a global mass
phenomenon but, most importantly, thoroughly dependent on visual images and practices. The very act of photographing and filming has become an integral part of the performance and experience of paying witness, which entails the swift translation of a
private sensory experience into public mediated testimony that can be infinitely reproduced and shared worldwide via wireless communication networks (cf. Reading, 2009).
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Hence, we need to rethink what it is to witness in a cultural context significantly reconfigured by the widespread use of camera-phones for continuous self-remodelling and
instant communication and bonding (Van Dijck, 2007). If taking pictures is paramount to
experiencing an event and, simultaneously, the direct communication and sharing of
experiences via photographs and video clips has become the ‘preferred idiom of a new
generation of users’ (Van Dijck, 2007: 57), then we must consider the ways in which the
performance and function of testimony indeed suit this wider shift. As shown in the following, the use of the camera-phone in new forms of embodied political action traverses
the conventional distinctions associated with the notion of Holocaust testimony.
Performances of citizen camera-witnessing can be seen to cut across conventional binaries such as the private and the public, the self and the other, the body and the machine,
the local and the global, the citizen and the journalist; and also to unsettle the paradox of
the imperative of bearing witness to atrocity yet being caught within the difficulty of
relating that which is considered beyond the limits of representation (cf. Reading, 2009).
While refuting Peters’ claim that to ‘be there, present at the event in space and time’
is the condition for true witnessing, I employ witnessing theory to interrogate how the
camera-phone, and the perpetual networked state it now endows individuals, have provided citizens with a new form of capital in producing testimony that has the potential to
challenge and provide a counter-gaze to that of entrenched powers. This engages the
important notion of ‘witnessing as field’, advanced by Ashuri and Pinchevski (2009),
which is premised on the claim that witnessing per definition is linked to politically
charged situations of conflict or dispute (see also Rentschler, 2004). Their attempt to
recast witnessing as a political struggle that transpires in what Pierre Bourdieu designates as a ‘field’ provides important guidance for thinking about the role and function of
the mobile camera-witness in relation to issues of power and politics. However, as I suggest in the next section, we need to go beyond the broadcast-age model of a ‘field’
assumed by Ashuri and Pinchevski, since it inhibits the recognition of the transformations being ushered in by the processes of convergence and globalization.
The rise of a networked and visually conditioned ‘field of
witnessing’
Ashuri and Pinchevski (2009) denominate witnessing as a social and politically contested
terrain in which various agents compete to gain the trust of their designated audiences.
The field of witnessing embraces all the key agents of media witnessing – eyewitnesses
(those who have firsthand experience of the event), mediators (the various agents and
agencies who produce and broadcast testimonies), and audiences – each with their own
strategic positions, interests and competences in the field. Critically, this conceptualization of witnessing as a ‘field’ presupposes a pre-convergent, broadcast era model of mass
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