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On the User's Side: Youtube and Distant Witnessing in The Article Convergence: The International Journal of Research into On the user’s side: YouTube New Media Technologies 2018, Vol. 24(1) 33–49 ª The Author(s) 2017 and distant witnessing in the Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav age of technology-enhanced DOI: 10.1177/1354856517736980 mediability journals.sagepub.com/home/con Michele Martini University of Haifa, Israel Abstract The rise of YouTube as a means of social struggle is progressively reshaping the relationship between macro-level international organizations and local actors who adopt media-based resis- tance strategies. Accordingly, this article addresses the following issue: how has the evolution and expansion of YouTube redefined the political relevance of viewership? To answer this question, the transforming role of the viewer will be examined through the comparison of diverse human rights videos which sparked national and international outrage. This comparison will shed light on how the development and transnational diffusion of new forms of online video-mediated com- munication have changed the social perception of everyday media practices and experiences. Ultimately, the recent use of camera-drones and live-streaming technologies will be discussed in relation to pioneering forms of collective digital witnessing and their implications in the contem- porary political landscape. Keywords Camera drone, human rights videos, live streaming, mediability, social movement, viewership, witnessing Introduction In the study of online video-mediated communication, the role of users has often been described in relation to their usage of social tools. The various levels of engagement allowed by the digital architectures of video-sharing websites delineate and construct diverse forms of public, which are usually differentiated on the basis of the interactions users have with online content. Common concepts utilized to describe online videos’ outreach are popularity (i.e. view-count), audience Corresponding author: Michele Martini, Department of Education, University of Haifa, Aba Khuoshy Av. 199, Haifa 3498838, Israel. Email: [email protected] 34 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 24(1) (i.e. statistics) and community activity (i.e. comments and likes/dislikes). However, rather than accounting for the various modes of audiovisual communication enabled by YouTube, these different definitions focus on users’ activity, that is, they label and categorize YouTube users in relation to their social behaviour (e.g. commenting or trolling). Diverging from this ‘social’ approach, this article describes YouTube users as occupants of viewer positions. Viewer positions are conceived as specific ‘points of view’ constructed by audiovisual texts or, in other words, by the different forms of audiovisual communication enabled by YouTube (e.g. online video and live streaming). The viewer position constructed by a video, even if occupied by an unpredictable variety of users, remains constant and potentially defines users’ perspective on a certain event. Even more than this, it expresses the relationship linking filming-users to watching users through the recorded occurrence. Starting from this point, the present study discusses the transformation of the viewer position in relation to the new forms of video-mediated communication enabled by YouTube. Shedding light on these changes will allow a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities posed by emerging forms of collective distant witnessing on video-sharing platforms. Accordingly, this study asks: how has the evolution and expansion of YouTube redefined the political relevance of the viewer position? To answer this question, this study will investigate the use of YouTube by disadvantaged communities and specifically examine the various relationships ordinary citizens establish with a perceived global viewership. Indeed, the rise of online video as a means of social struggle is progressively reshaping the relationship between macro-level international organizations, such as the United Nations, and local actors who adopt media-based resistance strategies. From human rights campaigns to oral history projects, disadvantaged minorities around the world are more and more frequently turning to online video as a medium through which they record, expose and archive violations of human rights (e.g. Witness, B’Tselem and Film the Police). Bypassing state institutions, the local production and global circulation of video evidence has strongly supported the development of transnational human rights movements (e.g. Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions and Black Lives Matter) and paved the way to the emergence of new forms of bottom-up counter-surveillance practices. The political relevance of online video-mediated communication will be approached as a multi-faceted social construct which results from the interaction between the actors taking part in the communication process. Accordingly, it will be assessed and discussed through the analysis of the interplay between three main agents: users (producers/consumers), national governments and YouTube. In the first section (YouTube–government interaction), the political relevance of online videos will be discussed through data provided by Google Transparency Report. The number and nature of official content-removal requests received by YouTube every year will shed light on both the relevance of online videos for state actors and the arbitrating role played by the website in eval- uating, refusing or accepting such requests. The second section (government–users interaction) will address the potential of YouTube videos to interfere with institutionally defined regimes of visibility. This facet of the communication process will be investigated through the comparison of diverse human rights videos which sparked national and international outrage. In the third section (YouTube–users interaction), the transforming role of users will be examined in order to highlight how the development and transnational diffusion of new forms of online video-mediated com- munication have changed the social perception of everyday practices and experience, resulting eventually in an enhanced ‘mediability of reality’. Ultimately, the final section (user–user inter- action) will explore the progressive blurring of the distinction between filming-users and watching Martini 35 users in the emerging forms of participatory visual experience. To this aim, the recent use of camera-drones and live-streaming technologies by NO Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protesters will be discussed to shed light on the latest pioneering forms of collective digital witnessing and their impact on video/user interaction in the contemporary political landscape. YouTube and governmental agencies: Dealing with content-removal requests The history of YouTube could be seen, from a certain perspective, as the global emergence of online video-mediated communication; the popularization, on a global scale, of new forms of interaction between filming-users and watching users. In recent years, the blurred boundary between producer and consumer in the digital era (Delwiche and Henderson, 2012; Jenkins et al., 2009; Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010) and the political potential of the popularization of the digital means of networked production (Benkler, 2006; Ithiel de Sola, 1983; Martini, 2017) have been an object of academic study. In the case of YouTube, the unprecedented possibility for users to disclose themselves in deeds and words (Arendt, 1958) to a potentially global public, that is, to independently create direct visual linkages between local dimensions on an international scale, immediately attracted the attention of governments. On the one hand, the communicative power of YouTube has been exploited by established political actors both to enhance the outreach of their public performances (English et al., 2011; Towner and Dulio, 2011) and to interfere with demo- cratic processes (Kellner, 2015), as, for example, has emerged from the intelligence report on the 2016 US elections (Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2017: 10–11). On the other hand, however, data provided by Alphabet Inc., the conglomerate which owns Google and several Google subsidiaries such as YouTube, indicate the controversial and in some cases even antag- onistic relationship national states have with YouTube. According to Google Transparency Report, in 2015, the Russian government demanded the removal of 1466 videos (326 for Drug Abuse, 370 for National Security, 184 for Government Criticism), the Turkish government demanded the removal of 1258 videos (487 for National Security, 357 for Privacy and Security, 304 for Defa- mation) and the government of Thailand demanded the removal of 1477 videos, all of them for Government Criticism. Obviously, this scant data are incomplete and merely illustrative. None- theless, it underscores the existence of diverse governmental policies concerning the circulation of YouTube videos as well as the key role played by Google Inc. in regulating governmental censorship. Since 2009, YouTube has been without interruption the Google product which received the highest number of content-removal requests per year. Moreover, since 2015, the gap between the volume of content-removal requests received by the video-sharing platform (1885) and that of the two closest competitors, Google Search Engine (1476) and Blogger (703), has become more and more significant. As a general
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