Seeing is believing

Photo by Joseph Galanakis

By Harry van Versendaal

When Thimios Gourgouris first caught the news of furious rioting in downtown Athens in December 2008, he reached for his Nikon camera. As the Greek capital surrendered to an orgy of violence and looting sparked by the fatal shooting of a teenager by police, the curious young man from the suburbs took to the debris-strewn streets to document the mayhem.

Three years later, the number of people like Gourgouris have skyrocketed. As public rallies against the Socialist government’s austerity measures — sanctioned by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, the debt-choked country’s foreign creditors — keep coming, more people seem to have set aside the traditional flag and banner for a more versatile medium: the digital camera. Just type “Greek protests 2011” into Google Images and you’ll get more than 5 million results.

This burst of interest in user-generated content is propelled by more than one reason. But, like elsewhere around the world, it is principally born out of public skepticism toward conventional media.

“I want to see with my own eyes what is happening out there. I stopped relying just on the stuff I was being fed by television,” Gourgouris, a tall man with a dark beard and expressive eyes, said in a recent interview.

Greece’s mainstream media have not escaped unscathed from popular criticism of the country’s institutions. Television channels and newspapers — traditionally associated with the nation’s political parties — are seen as pandering to political and business interests.

“I only trust what I see,” Gourgouris said.

Born in 1980, Gourgouris has never belonged to a political party. A former graphic designer who now works as a commercial representative in Elefsina, a small town west of Athens, he dreams of one day becoming a war photographer. The streets around Syntagma Square make good training ground, he jokes. When venturing into the urban scuffles, he wears gloves, body armor and a green Brainsaver helmet equipped with a built-in camera. “Last time a piece of marble hit me on the right shoulder,” he said.

Gourgouris makes a point of sharing all of his pictures on Flickr, the image- and video-hosting website. All his photographs are free to download in high resolution. One of his shots from the latest riots shows a riot policeman trying to snatch an SLR camera from a man standing in Syntagma Square. A woman reacts to the scene while trying to protect a fellow demonstrator who appears to be in a state of shock.

“If I had to keep a single image from the protest, it would have to be that one,” he said.

Protest 3.0

Around the globe, protests are reshaped by technology. Ever-cheaper digital gadgets and the Internet are transforming the means and the motives of the people involved in ways we are only starting to witness.

Last spring, the twitterati hailed the “social media revolutions” in Tunisia and Egypt as protesters made extensive use of social networks to bring down their despotic presidents. Facebook and Twitter played a key role in fomenting public unrest following Iran’s disputed election in 2009. Like Iran, Libya showed the same media are available to the autarchic regimes.

Greece is not immune to social and technological forces. In May, thousands of people responded to a Facebook call by the so-called Indignant movement to join an anti-austerity rally at Syntagma and other public squares across the country. Demonstrators, who have since camped in front of the Greek Parliament, use laptops to organize and promote their campaign through the Net.

When individuals’ behavior changes, mass protests also change. Gourgouris says that whenever he sees the police arresting a demonstrator, he feels that by running to the scene an officer will think twice before exerting unnecessary physical force.

“When everybody is filming with their cell phones, you’re not going to beat the hell out of that person,” he said.

Switching places

Technology is also transforming the news business, as ordinary folk get involved in the gathering, filtering and dissemination of information.

“It’s evolution,” said Pavlos Fysakis, a professional photographer in his early 40s. He says that this type of guerrilla journalism may not guarantee quality, but it is certainly a force for pluralism.

“The news now belongs to everyone. It comes from many different sources, and it is open to many different interpretations,” said Fysakis, who is one of the 14 photojournalists to have worked on The Prism GR2010 multimedia project, a collective documentation of Greece during last winter that is available on the Internet.

If there is one problem will all this input, Fysakis says, it has to do with the diminishing shock factor. With all the imagery out there, he warns, audiences as well as photographers risk getting a bit too accustomed to graphic images.

“Violence is demystified. We almost think it’s normal to see a cop beating up a person on the street. The image is everywhere, as if [the event] is occurring all the time,” Fysakis said.

User-generated footage of the June 29 demonstrations depicted riot police firing huge amounts of tear gas and physically abusing protesters, including elderly men and women.

The apparently excessive use of force by police is the subject of a parliamentary investigation. Meanwhile, a prosecutor has brought charges against the police for excessive use of chemicals and for causing bodily harm to citizens. Amnesty International has also condemned the police tactics.

Exposed

For Liza Tsaliki, a communications and media expert at the University of Athens, crowdsourced content “is laden with democratic potential.”

“Civilian footage of the riots has widened our perspective and understanding of what actually happened,” she said of the June demonstrations.

A few hours after the protests, the Internet was churning with footage apparently showing riot squad officers escorting three men who had covered their faces and appeared to be wielding iron bars, prompting suggestions that the police had either placed provocateurs within the protesting crowds or that the force was offering protection to extreme right-wing protesters who were battling leftists.

However, an official reaction (a statement by the minister for citizens’ protection that left a lot to be desired) only came after television channels had aired the controversial video.

Trust them not

To be sure, citizen journalism is far from perfect. A lot of the rigor and accuracy associated with traditional news organizations inevitably flies out the window. Ordinary people cannot perform, or are insensitive to, the (meticulous but costly and time-consuming) fact-based reporting, cross-checking, sourcing and editing of newsrooms proper.

A survey conducted in the UK a few years ago found that 99 percent of people do not trust content on blogs and forums uploaded by their friends and the rest of the public.

Lack of verification and eponymity is not the only problem, as input from non-journalists is not necessarily synonymous with objectivity.

Writing in Kathimerini about the controversial video, liberal commentator Paschos Mandravelis criticized social media users for unquestioningly embracing what seems to confirm the views they already hold.

“The T-shirt he was wearing to cover his face, which is usually offered by every protester as a sign of innocence (‘I was wearing it to protect myself from the tear gas’) was, in this case, used as a sign of guilt (‘It’s obvious. These are the hooded troublemakers’),” Mandravelis wrote.

Tsaliki agrees that not everything captured by amateur journalists is necessarily benign.

“Even in these latter cases, a certain alternative reality can be constructed under the guise of the non-mediated experience,” Tsaliki said.

“All you need is a certain choreography, some volunteers and a smartphone,” she said.

But the speed and diversity of social media is hard to beat. After all, it was a Pakistani Twitterer grumbling about the noise from a helicopter that gave the world live coverage of the American raid that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden in May.

Before that, it was some blurry footage of Alexandros Grigoropoulos’s murder in Exarchia, captured with a phone camera by a resident standing on a nearby balcony, that fanned Greece’s 2008 riots.

Traditional media have tried to take advantage of the trend, launching citizen journalism platforms of their own — CNN’s “iReport” or Al Jazeera’s “Sharek,” for example. And as suggested by Al Jazeera’s mining of the social media during the Middle East uprisings, the use of citizen-produced material can help commercial networks come across as the “voice of the people.”

“They overtly take the side of the protesters against these regimes. And their use of social media and citizen generated content gives them the ammunition and credibility in that campaign,” blogged Charlie Beckett, founding director of Polis, a journalism and society think-tank at the London School of Economics.

Preaching to the converted?

The Internet has changed the way people organize themselves and protest, but has it really helped expand the reservoirs of activists on the ground? Experts are divided on the issue.

For one thing, cyber-pessimists are right that support-a-cause-with-a-click attitudes produce great numbers but little commitment. Web-powered activism, Tsaliki adds, is still a lot about preaching to the converted.

“The Internet will chiefly serve those activists and groups that are already active, thus reinforcing existing patterns of political participation in society,” she said.

But Gourgouris is confident that simply by recording and sharing the message of a demonstration, you are increasing its impact.

“The world isn’t beautiful. I record the ugliness so I can put it out there and — to the extent that I can — fix it. I am trying to raise awareness. I am saying, ‘Here’s the violence of the people behind masks’,” he said.

As always, some people out there prefer more direct forms of engagement. As photographers zigzagged through the infuriated crowds at a recent demo, one hooded youth shouted at them to “put down the cameras and grab a stone.”

Being heard in a world of noise

By Harry van Versendaal

“I am not a social media consultobot. I don’t have a magic formula for making stuff work – no-one does, really.” Despite her humble pronouncements, since arriving at the Guardian headquarters in London, Meg Pickard, head of digital engagement for Guardian News and Media, has seen the site’s traffic skyrocket to a record 37 million unique visitors a month.

Pickard, a self-described creative geek with a background in social anthropology (some years ago she wandered highland Bolivia to conduct ethnographic research), she abandoned the academic environment for the bright lights of the internet some dozen years ago, working for startups as well as giant corporations like AOL.

Pickard visited Athens last week at an invitation by the British Council here to give a speech on social media. Meanwhile, she spoke to Athens Plus about how powerful internet tools like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are changing the way in which information is produced, distributed and consumed at the digital age and how this is impacting on mainstream media.

Do you think that traditional media can survive without embracing social media?

I think they can survive. But it will be a particularly lonely existence in the future. As news organizations are embracing digital more generally and people are reading and engaging and sharing and doing all of these things with the content you put out there, it seems like an odd thing to turn away from. So even if you as a news organization did not chose to participate on Facebook, you would probably want to support other people sharing your things on Facebook. Even if you as a news organization chose not to be on Twitter you would probably be delighted if other people were talking about and promoting and sharing links to your things on Twitter. So I think you can make a distinction between active publishing to social media spaces and embracing the organic social activity that is already taking place around your site. So the question would be: does your newspaper have a website? Are people already sharing it? If they are then, sorry, but you are already using social media, or social media is already affecting your business. So a really short answer to your question “can they survive?” is, yes they can survive, but if you imagine that future metrics are going to be less about circulation and more about reach and engagement then social media can only help towards these reach and engagement metrics.

Are we perhaps overestimating the impact of social media? After all, they are to a large degree rehashing information that has already been produced by traditional media which are doing the dirty work of investigation and cross checking of facts.

When people talk about things like collaboration and participation by users, citizen journalism and all that I think that if you imagine that this is going to take the place of media then you’re kind of thinking about it wrong. It’s “as well as,” not “instead of.” So in the case of the MPs expenses tool that we put together when somebody hit the button that said “This Is Interesting” we did not automatically publish it on the front page of the newspaper. When enough people pressed that button we were able to then use that information to focus the attention of the journalist who could then look at where the heat is and where the conversation is and then apply journalism on top of it. Then they could verify, they could fact-check, they could oversee. So I think that gradually things like social media do not tell the story for us, they help us see where the story is.

You recently wrote an article in the Guardian recently about social media rules for journalists. You said “a good journalist should be able to support a particular football team at the weekend but put aside his loyalties when reporting on another.” Are social media forcing us to have multiple identities?

I don’t think they are forcing us to have multiple identities. I think they are forcing us to be clear about which identity we are speaking with at a time. So I think you are going to see a lot more of journalists or for that matter an employee of a company putting disclaimers on their blogs or on their Twitter accounts saying I am not speaking on behalf of my employer or whatever. The point there about a journalist being able to support a particular football team at the weekend and then suspend that when they are writing somewhere else was because a good journalist is somebody who is not a robot, a good journalist is somebody who can bring and can be inspired by all of their information and excitement and interest in subjects and still tell a story in a way that is valuable and useful and not somebody who makes every output the same just because they like Manchester United. That is bad journalism.

Technologist Janor Lanier has attacked many of the Internet’s sacred cows. For Lanier there is no “wisdom of crowds,” only a cruel mob.

The phrase “wisdom of crowds” is used a lot at the moment in the wrong way. Francis Galton who came up with the idea of the wisdom of crowds was talking about a statistical anomaly. He was talking about the ability for a lot of people to somehow, without knowing about each other, settle upon the right answer – or an interesting answer – to something without talking about it. So in his case, it was people at a fairground guessing the weight of a cow. And they had 160 people or whatever it was and they all guessed the weight of the cow and the average number was the exact weight of the cow. So what does that tell us? It tells us that if you get enough guesses statistics will do the rest. That is what the wisdom of crowds is all about. It says that the crowd as a whole is more intelligent or is cleverer than one individual on their own who may guess something completely random. When people talk about “wisdom of the crowds” at the moment they are talking about crowds as forces for good. That is never what the intention of that phrase was, and it’s not right either. Actually crowds in any sense have good elements and bad elements and it depends what they are pointing towards or what they are united against. Right now [last week] in London there is a protest going on against school fees or university fees and as I left the hotel this evening they were breaking windows; this is a crowd that has assembled for a good reason because they want the state to pay for their university education and there are some people in the crowd that have led this in the bad direction. So when we talk about the wisdom of crowds we’re not saying that they’re always right. Who do we listen to? We should always apply judgment.

I tweet therefore I am

Google and Facebook have been criticized for their handling of private information. Do you share such security concerns?

I think that Google certainly around the Buzz experience and so on have learned that just because you can do something as an engineer does not necessarily mean that you should do something. It was like a social product designed by engineers because it was clever, not because it was sensitive or useful. I think that privacy is something that people want to have more control over as individuals and I think that it is always worrying when companies take liberties with information that we have entrusted to them. In the Google wi-fi case we did not entrust that information to them. The Google cars were wondering around and they wrote it down and used that information. Facebook is slightly different. I recently got a wedding invitation which at the bottom said “please take many photos and share them with us and with each other but please don’t upload any of them to Facebook.” Facebook’s copyright restrictions say that if you upload a picture they can use it for anything they want. That’s a worry.

Much of online youth activism is superficial. The idea that you can support the opposition movement in Iran or the liberation of Tibet with a click.

It’s easy to like something. It’s hard to actually engage. Well I think that actually issues and people who are lobbying for things need to work harder to get people to actually engage beyond the “like” button or engage beyond the “support now” button. How do you get people to put their money where their mouth is or put their ideas to actually act on things rather than just writing. Some charities, like Amnesty International, are doing interesting work in this area figuring out ways that they can extend that simple low barrier to entry and try to actually extend it to something else. Or take the atheist movement campaign on the side of London buses. They made a just giving page and people were able to contribute and they raised something like 20,000 pounds as loads of people gave very small amounts of money. And I think there is a thing there which says how do you think about the big picture and the big effect you want to have.

I have to say that much of the tweets and Facebook feeds smacks of narcissism and self-promotion. I hate having to put up with 99 percent of pure narcissism just to find something that might interest me. Do social media cause narcissism or are they merely an outlet for those who are already narcissistic?

I think people who are already narcissistic have always sought outlets for their narcissism. If you are a narcissist you will always find a way to promote yourself on any platform whether that is the bus or Twitter. That is just a facet of people’s innate need to express themselves to the world in some ways. I think Twitter can do things, can be useful but that the main use as you exactly allude to is finding the signal. In a thousand tweets how do you find the one tweet that you really need to see? And that’s partly about curation, it’s partly about how these things bubble to the top, it’s partly about how these things appear in your networks.

But I have to say the trend does seems to cultivate narcissism.

Of course it does. Absolutely. But then so does every technology to some extend. You have a great camera but other people with that camera take photos of themselves, endlessly at arms length so they can put them on Facebook. It’s what you do with technology that counts. The technology is not to blame. I think it’s the people. It’s people who say “Oh, I am famous to thousands, famous to millions!”

Would you say that technology is neutral, it’s a tool, it’s value free?

I wouldn’t say it’s value free. I think it’s an enabler and it inspires us to do things but I don’t think that we can blame technology for human failings.

Selfless filmmaking. True or false?

By Harry van Versendaal

“Never let facts get in the way of a good story,” the journalistic adage goes. Documentary filmmakers these days seem more and more tempted to adopt the old newspaper truism. The need for access, financial resources and audience appeal is pulling doc-makers away from the traditional ethical principles of accuracy and non-involvement. Wilma de Jong, an award-winning director, producer and author from the Netherlands, chaired a discussion on ethical issues in the digital age, organized by the 12th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. De Jong, a lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex, spoke to Athens Plus about the ethical challenges facing the craft.

A 2009 report from the Center for Social Media at American University (“Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work”) found that documentarians did not hesitate to manipulate “individual facts, sequences and meanings of images” if that served to convey the film’s “higher truth.” Was that news for you? If so, how bad was the news?

No, it is not news. There have been cases both in the UK (Marc de Beaufort) and the US (Michael Moore) where manipulation of sequences has taken place or chronology of events has been altered for the sake of narrative or message. It is highly problematic, as these incidents undermine the documentary’s privileged position in the public sphere and its aim to reveal or unravel hidden stories or to tell stories about unknown corners of our world. This is beyond providing a different point of view or an original angle. Historically speaking, it is not new but these incidents seem to have become more prominent. The highly commercial and competitive environment in which documentary filmmakers are operating has led to films and a culture in which the spectacular possesses higher value than truthfulness.

Basically, the competition for audiences and subsequent income from advertising distorts civic, democratic values — not always intentionally but being part of that kind of environment makes it sometimes difficult to reflect on your choices or even having the time to reflect at all.

Just how much interaction and intervention is acceptable in documentaries? Should a filmmaker remain completely detached from his or her subject?

This question seems to suggest that the “real” documentary is an observational “fly on the wall” documentary. Observational documentaries have their own strengths and weaknesses. The direct access and liveliness of these documentaries give the impression of realities being represented as unaltered. Actually subject choice, no context and selecting sequences with high emotional intensity means that a “spectacular” reality is being presented. A filmmaker cannot detach him or herself from the subjects or the realities he or she is filming. You, as filmmaker, are part of that situation. There is no such thing as an autonomous reality which can be filmed “objectively.” The camera and the presence of the filmmaker will always affect the pro-filmic scene, the situation that is being filmed, but truthfulness to your subjects is and will always be essential.

Should the line be drawn at life-or-death situations?

I would think so.

Labelling a film as documentary involves standards of “objectivity” and “truth.” Can a documentary be more than a mediated view of the world? Shouldn’t we expect documentarians to be honest rather than “objective”?

Objectivity is a myth. A documentary is a negotiation between filmmaker and its subjects and is always a representation, revealing a specific point of view of filmed realities.

Documentary filmmakers explore the space between “story” and “fact.” A “story” may have a fictional connotation but a documentary needs a storyline, a narrative as a way of linking events in the historical world. Facts are meaningless without a storyline, narrative. We see more strongly authored films at the moment, which can be seen as a departure from “objectivity” and an open admission that a documentary is a specific analysis and representation of certain realities.

What are the most common violations of the ethical code by documentarians?

There is not really an official code – just a set of principles which are inspired by journalist principles. Most common violations are altering the chronology of events without making this clear in the film; using archive footage out of context or suggesting implicitly that the footage was shot somewhere else; misrepresentation of certain groups in society.

Can you tell us of an ethical dilemma you’ve had to face as a filmmaker?

Paying a subject for an interview. It happened quite some time ago. He was a drug addict and I wanted his story. Later I regretted it and thought that I should have made clear in the film that I had paid the interviewee.

Most documentaries now depend on television networks for funding and distribution. Some filmmakers complain of having to customize their work to meet the commercial-driven demands of broadcasters. What are the implications of this on documentary films?

The narration is often used to explain what can be seen but it makes the film accessible to big audiences, broadcasters argue. But are audiences really that media illiterate? Commercial breaks in the film often leads to requests for a repeat introduction of the film after the break has finished, which is very frustrating.

Stories need to be told in a very traditional way. A kind of Hollywood-style narrative that forces the story in a certain direction excludes possibly interesting information as it does not fit the “hero-wants-something-but-meets-obstacles-overcomes-obstacles-or-not-and-is-forever-happy-or-not” kind of story telling.

The rise of docudramas has come with a whole new bag of ethical questions. Do you consider them a legitimate format within the documentary genre or something clearly outside it?

Yes, why not? Documentaries’ role in the public sphere is provoking debate and unravelling or unearthing hidden stories. If you don’t have access to those events or the events happened in the past, docudrama might be a good way to bring a story in the public domain.

Digital lies

You are giving a speech on documentary ethics in the digital age at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. What is it that differentiates the digital era from the analogue one from an ethical perspective? In what ways has the change of the medium affected the ethical quality of the message?

Computer-generated images and digital manipulation of shots can lead to created sequences being presented as filmed sequences, as having an indexical link with events taken place in the outside world.

Re-enactment on the other hand, has a long tradition in documentary filmmaking, when a filmmaker has no access to an event or wants to incorporate past events in a film. This is not a problem, as long as it is being presented as a re-enactment. I’m afraid the ethical dimension of a film is the responsibility of the filmmaker — but that is of course not new, but in different historical periods and political/cultural contexts, the nature of the ethical dilemmas is different. Ethics is not a static concept.

Except for some technological tricks that were not available to the documentary filmmaker in analogue times, I don’t think that technology is the real issue. It’s a cultural and political problem.

Video-sharing websites like YouTube and vimeo have revolutionized the documenting and self-documenting capability of individuals. One has the power to reach a remarkably huge audience at zero cost. What has the effect been on the documentary genre?

These new developments have undermined institutionalized views of the world and provide a plethora of experiences and ideas. I would consider it liberating that independent documentary filmmakers can find new audiences outside commercially driven and bureaucratic institutions – but at the same time the spectacular, the voyeuristic elements have become more prevalent.

New developments tend to offer positive and negative effects. The emphasis on individual experiences and often exhibitionist footage is at the expense of critical analysis and creative films analyzing our world or offering creative answers and ideas. We need inspiration, new ideas and original analysis and original documentary forms of our world, not stereotyped and predictable films.

One of the present problems for contemporary documentary filmmakers is to make a living. Broadcasters prefer documentary entertainment and formatted series, which require not only a production context of a bigger company but also a choice of subjects that will provide entertainment, the bizarre or the spectacular.

PROFILE
Wilma de Jong is a lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. She has been an independent filmmaker for 13 years and produced award-winning films on social and political issues. She also co-authored “Global Activism, Global Media,” along with Martin Shaw and Neil Stammers.