The Authenticity of the Event: On the Testimony of Web Videos

Project: Dissertation project

Project participants

Description

During recent years web videos have established a global bottom-up aesthetic of resistance. Be it the Green Revolution in Teheran, the various American and European Occupy Movements, or the Arab Spring and its aftermath: The omnipresent lenses of handheld cameras and smartphones amplify the visibility of political controversies and give the former unheard and unseen a voice and a face.

By challenging established relationships of those seeing and those being seen, these artefacts of “sousveillance” (Steve Mann) provide new shapes for the old believe in social change fostered by media. But the raw aesthetics of the footage also triggers an even older cultural desire for immediacy and implies the promise of an authentic expression and experience that traditional news coverage fails to grasp.
These “poor images” (Hito Steyerl) thereby make visible interfering social and media dynamics that coincide in the form of “critical events” (Pierre Bourdieu) – ready to be promoted by marketing buzzwords like YouTube-, Twitter- and Facebook-revolution.

Often serving as exclusive documents, web videos build up an alternative form of social testimony undermining the conventions of mass media authentication as well as the constitutive distinction between offender, victim and witness. With web videos we become witnesses through the eyes of victims, who also might be offenders. What we need is a witness for the witness.

The study asks how our perception of media testimony and media events change in the digital media environment of the “web video sphere” (Andreas Treske). It therefore reconstructs the shift from (innovative and aesthetic) authenticity to (re-established and institutional) authentication that has taken place since 2009. It thereby tells the story of a technologically altered “distribution of the sensible” (Jacques Rancière) together with its social resonances and political implications in and for digital cultures.
StatusFinished
Period01.11.0912.10.17

Recently viewed

Activities

  1. Bildungsveranstaltung der Fachschaft WiSo des Cusanuswerks
  2. Universität Bielefeld (Externe Organisation)
  3. Lüneburg Workshop on Environmental and Sustainability Communication - 2006
  4. Digital Badges zur Optimierung der Studieneingangsphase - Anwendungsbeispiel für die Hochschullehre
  5. 25th EAS Conference / ISME European Regional Conference 2017
  6. Cultural Dimensions of Sustainability
  7. Teaching Listening in the EFL Classroom
  8. Zweitgutachten für Dissertation Mario Steppe
  9. Lehrerfortbildung 2013
  10. Workshop Ökonomie des Elends. Pierre Bourdieu in Algerien
  11. An International Perspective on Trends in Higher Education
  12. Fakultät Management und Technologie (Organisation)
  13. We have never been nomads: did we really take the spatial turn?
  14. Ein Chatbot-System für das Fremdsprachenlernen
  15. De la lutte des classes aux antagonismes diffus
  16. Organising Artistic Practice: Understanding the Materialised Legitimation of Site-Specific Performances
  17. SIOP Conference 2001
  18. Education for Sustainable Development for Grundtvig Courses
  19. Mehrsprachigkeit in der Schule – Defizit oder Ressource? Überzeugungen angehender Lehrkräfte
  20. Visualisieren des Textverständnisses
  21. SASE 2021 – Virtual Conference
  22. Language learning in the mainstream classroom: Social Studies teachers’ approaches and attitudes
  23. 2nd EqUIP Symposium 2016
  24. The CCO Data Collective (Externe Organisation)
  25. Is Neoliberalism Still Spreading?
  26. Wieso klappt das nicht?! Videoanalyse zur individuellen Weiterentwicklung
  27. Fakultät Management und Technologie (Organisation)
  28. Tagung - 18. Internationale Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik (Veranstaltung)
  29. Grenzen überwinden
  30. ENTER Conference 2011