Three terrible things happened in the past week. Each of them, a turning point in our world's rapid shift from a physical to a digital environment.
And it’s all about video.
The number of smartphones is approaching 3 billion. Connected, video-enabled smartphones turn the planted from passive participants to active observers. The overused phrase ‘citizen journalism’ is rapidly becoming one of the central principals of how we observe and communicate.
And no doubt “Live” changes who’s making content, and who controls what’s made.
As Shelly Palmer wrote on his blog:
Each new video technology has brought a new communications paradigm with it. From the handycam used to capture the beating of Rodney King in 1991 to the 2014 smartphone video of the death of Eric Garner to the most recent terrorist attacks in Orlando and around the world, images captured by ordinary people with actioncams, camera drones and, of course, camera phones and smartphones have been part of our daily video experience.
But Facebook Live is a whole new thing.
There’s no doubt that we’ll be seeing more dramatic, terrible, painful, frightening video in the months ahead. It’s what Shelly Palmer calls “unfiltered video journalism.” But as I learned back when
Reynolds: Stay with me. We got pulled over for a busted tail light in the back and the police he’s he’s he’s covered….They killed my boyfriend. He’s licensed to carry. He was trying to get out his ID and his wallet out his pocket, and he let the officer know that he was, that he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm.
Officer: Ma’am, keep your hands where they are!
Reynolds: I will sir, no worries, I will.
Officer: Fuck!
Reynolds: He just got his arm shot off. We got pulled over on Carpenter.
Officer: I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his head up!
Reynolds: He had, you told him to get his ID, sir, his driver’s license. Oh my god please don’t tell me he’s dead.
There’s no doubt that the immediacy of real video has impact. But is it journalism, or surveillance. Palmer observers the nature of smartphone video changes the storytelling genre. "The nature of the lenses on smartphones, the vertical aspect ratio and the intimate arm’s-length distance between you, the people close enough to be in your frame, and the audience has created a new storytelling genre capable of communicating in ways we have not seen before.”
And Columbia Journalism Review takes the conversation one step further:
"Facebook’s real-time video capabilities provide a larger and more direct conduit between incidents and far-away audiences. While there are some hitches to this sort of third-party publishing—Reynolds’s Facebook video was temporarily inaccessible due to a supposed “technical glitch”—its potential reach can’t be overstated. Reynolds’s broadcast was viewed more than 3.5 million times on Facebook alone as of 2 p.m. Thursday.”
However you feel about the issue of the police, the violence in Dallas, the ongoing debate about the death of young black men by police officers - one thing is certain, you can’t “unsee” what Reynolds broadcast live to million of Facebook viewers.
CJR: "Reynolds’s citizen journalism gave Americans her unvarnished perspective of the aftermath, a crucial angle that would have gone through multiple layers of reporters and editors otherwise.”
Three things happened last week. Philander Castile was killed. Five Dallas police officers were killed in terrible retribution. And Alton Sterling was shot by police officers outside a Louisiana convenience store. All were captured on video. And video will be the counterpoint of all of these conversations, and the events that will happen in the aftermath.
Citizen journalism - and all its complexity - is here to stay.
