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Moving Pictures
July 28, 2006
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And I'm Bob Garfield. In the last two weeks, we've looked closely at how the war in Israel and Lebanon has been covered by press around the world in newspapers and on broadcast, cable and satellite television. This week, we logged onto youtube.com, one of the major hubs for citizen video, to see what was happening at the intersection of the digital revolution and breaking news. The answer is, journalistically, not much.
[STREET SOUNDS/EXPLOSIONS]
That, with 390,000-some views, is from the most-watched video under the
search term "Lebanon." It's a grainy, static shot of Beirut's sky at night
with two distant bomb flashes, more like a thunderstorm than a siege.
This is a surprise. The 2004 tsunami yielded breathtaking footage from tourist
camcorders of whole villages being consumed in the tidal surge. Last year,
the London subway bombings were reported within minutes via cell phone cameras.
Surely more than two weeks of war would produce pictures worth thousands
of words dead bodies, panicked innocents, radicalized civilians vowing revenge,
but there are very few.
When it comes to the wholesale reinvention of spot journalism, this time
around, the nascent vlogosphere has come up pretty much empty-handed. But
wait. It may be we were looking for the wrong thing.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER/VIDEO POST]:
MAN: I want to talk again about Israel and Syria
and Palestine. I just want people to know and to tell why that, that keeps
happening. That's all.
BOB GARFIELD: That's another of the most viewed
video posts from this crisis, a young man posed in front of an olive-green
drape, gently suing for piece. Simplistic? Naive? Maybe. But this man's
sincerity struck a nerve. Nearly 200,000 people have viewed Peace Guy, and
4,000 of them were moved to post comments, just as 4,000 commented on the
static shot of the Beirut skyline
Because the vlogosphere is not just a bunch of amateurs trading videos
it's a sort of living organism with the human quality of self-awareness
- within a day of the original Peace video, another one popped up, same
guy, same olive drape, same vaguely Middle Eastern accent.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER/VIDEO POST]:
MAN: Israel, the Jew, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon,
the Muslims, please stop.
BOB GARFIELD: Except it wasn't the same guy. It
was a different guy doing a spoof of the Peace video. I'll leave off the
punchline on the grounds of vulgarity, but the joke isn't the point. The
point is that journalism is not the only means for processing traumatic
events. There is also the rest of mass culture. And to surf YouTube is to
see the cultural conversation, like time-lapse pictures of a fetus in the
womb, gestate before our eyes.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
copyright © 2006 WNYC Radio
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