« It's Election Day... | Main | Paxilback, or Thinking About Parody and/as Revision »

November 25, 2006

Shocked (again and again - we keep watching)

By now you've possibly heard about the UCLA student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, who was tasered repeatedly by UCLA police officers in a series of unfortunate events. If you haven't seen the video, take a few minutes and watch it here (fair warning -- this is a disturbing video, and probably NSFW, due to the screaming and suggested violence):

From the Bruins Nation blog (who were the first to provide details on the incident), the Associated Press, and the Daily Bruin student newspaper, we learn that this is what happened:

This incident is disturbing regardless of the motives of Tabatabainejad or the UCLA police officers at the scene. The violence is disturbing. The use (and abuse?) of force is disturbing. The threat to non-ID-carrying students is disturbing. And yes, the ethnic angle of police aggression against an Iranian-American student is disturbing. As John Aravosis points out at AmericaBlog, UCLA student columnist David Lazar ended his moderate-seeming column calling for calm until all of the relevant facts can be discovered and understood with this bio: "Send your favorite Rodney King jokes to Lazar at lazar@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu."

At the venerable Talking Points Memo blog, David Kurtz responds with disgust to the UCLA incident, noting that "The video itself apparently didn't prompt an outside review, but concerns from alum (i.e., donors) and parents did. Nice." And Cory Doctorow delivers a blistering indictment at Boing Boing of UCLA Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams for "blaming the student for going to the library without his student card in his pocket."

Eugene Robinson's latest op-ed at the Washington Post doesn't bring up the ethnic and racial implications of the UCLA tasering, but does discuss recent racist outbursts by celebrities Michael Richards (Kramer from Seinfeld) and Mel Gibson, as well as the infamous "macaca" jibe that may have cost George Allen his Virginia Senate seat.

This is hard stuff to deal with, and it's hard material to watch.

The UCLA video keeps sending me to ever-more-extreme unicorn chasers, the George Allen bit was unpleasant as well as unimaginably politically stupid, and the Michael Richards video is almost outside the bounds of comprehension. But what I want to discuss, briefly (I'm still needing that chaser), is the media shift represented by these, especially the Tabatabainejad and Richards events.

(For the record, today's unicorn chaser is Pleo, the robotic camarasaurus that Ugobe promised would be in stores by Christmas 2006. It's not. But it's still awfully cute.)

Watching the video of Tabatabainejad being tased repeatedly amid the screams of himself and the students in the computer lab (okay, back to Pleo for a minute), one thing you can't help but notice is that the camera operator is awful as a camera operator. The Richards videographer is better, but I suspect that this is due more to standard seating design in theaters than the operator's skill with a camera phone. And that's the point -- these events are things we know about because random, ordinary people used the technology they carry around with them every day to record an extraordinary event. A few years ago, friends of ours complained that it was impossible to buy a new cellphone that wasn't also a cameraphone (camera phones were being banned from many areas due to privacy concerns -- see here, here, here, and especially here for more on this), but today (except at Samsung) the near-ubiquity of cameraphones has rendered them almost a non-issue.

But now these features on cellphones (it's not just cameraphones, it's the capacity to take video now) are enabling a new era of what might be called "citizen reportage" (if you were Dan Gillmor) or "distributed panoptocism" (if you were Michel Foucault). Citizen reportage because the vital task of the news media -- the public reportage of attention-deserving events -- is being filled by private citizens, and panopticism because if anyone can be capable of filming your deeds and/or misdeeds, is anyone, anywhere, ever really free of the threat of unwanted publicity?

Enabling (and perhaps fueling?) the spread of amateur news video are sites like TMZ.com and YouTube, that make it possible for anyone with an Internet connection to see and hear for themselves what all the uproar is about.

In the age of Rathergate and the Mark Foley scandal, we see that blogs do, indeed, continue to make news and have real-world effects.

But our age is also the age of the wardobe malfunction and the tasered student and the racial epithet ad nauseam.

After watching the UCLA video, does it make a difference to you to learn that "The officers used the device in stun mode — which affects only the part of the body being touched — rather than the dart mode, in which tiny electrodes are fired into a person and pass a current through them, disabling the person entirely"? What are we to make of the audience members laughing at Michael Richards as he celebrates the American cultural tradition of lynching? Does the multimodal form of video provide enough affective input to override our rationality? Do YouTube and video cameraphones signal a new era of yellow journalism?

These are, clearly, issues that need much more attention. I can't help but ask my highly intelligent and deeply opinionated readership: which do you see as being the greater force for change -- blogs or the video sharing sites?

And now it's time for one last Pleo chaser.

(Via AmericaBlog, who first brought this to The Spouse's attention)

Posted by reparent at November 25, 2006 7:44 PM