We Can Be Fooled by Our Own Media Habits
Another factor that normalizes the tasercam picture is that these videos are the product of photography, a medium that has its own critical history defining it as a violent form of expression both because it “takes” its subject’s “skins” or surface appearance and because of the behavior of the person taking the picture. Photographer Bill Jay asserts that the “ single most consistent attribute of the twentieth century photographer is his willingness, and even desire, to violate any and all social conventions of good behavior in order to take a picture.” [Jay, p.1]. [Sontag] [Vettel-becker]. Before Tasers, the close cultural association between making the picture and producing the effect on a living being has perhaps its most extreme manifestation in the 1960 film Peeping Tom, directed by Michael Powell, a horror film in which a photographer murders women with a blade concealed in his tripod while filming their dying moments. Surely this is a close precursor to what we see in tasercam video [Feigensen]. Tasercam videos do not end with the death of the victim (or we are not given that portion of the tape) but they come close to the low budget snuff film in underground violent pornography, which surely, some finders of fact may well have seen.
How do the facts of photography as a medium complicate our understanding of video? First, and common to all photography, is that we have a reading problem – photographs look real. Second, the social context has shifted dramatically: anyone can make quite good photographs now and they are easy to disseminate. Non-gatekeepers are making pictures to create alternative histories of public and private events; they are “talking” back to power. Official sources are using photography (as they always have) as a weapon in info wars. Our reading problem when it comes to photography arises from the fact that a photograph looks like something we might have observed with our own eyes were we but there. We are wired with the cognitive default setting that we automatically believe that something that looks real, actually is or was real. [Reeves & Nass]. Video represents “the real” because it looks real in the same way as pictures from other cameras and because it moves, it is even more lifelike. The photographic picture in general is a very complex object because it participates in all three elements of the Peircean sign triad. At first glance the photograph is a Peircean iconic sign, because it overwhelmingly resembles the surface characteristics of that which it depicts; nevertheless, “it is directly and physically influenced by its object, and is therefore an index; and lastly it requires a learned process of “reading” to understand it”[Huening] which brings it into the realm of mediation and symbolic (Peircean) structures. Interestingly, while Peirce’s system articulates the reasons for photography’s power, Peirce himself failed to see his own errors when he limited photography’s power to the indexical. [Kibbey, pp. 132-164].
Perhaps it is this semiotic triple play that gives the photograph its particular power over us as a medium of exchange. While it is true of all semiosis that it is dynamic and not neatly fixed, this appeal to the entire basic Peircean triad of the relationship of the sign to its object must confer extra credibility on the photograph. I would suggest that it is precisely because of this power that we are so unable to disentangle our perception that it reflects reality of some kind from the proposition that what it shows IS reality. That is, at first glance, without training, we miss entirely that we are looking at a picture of reality that has been transformed by a technology that has characteristics of its own. The camera is being operated by someone or something that has a reason for taking the picture. (Note how this is analogically like the common sense construction that if a person is arrested, they must be guilty; both suppositions have the potential to lead to serious miscarriages of justice.) The picture, in turn, is then deployed as a sign in a context. Tasers equipped with video and used by the police are made to record the actions of the person using the gun in context for a record of what happened, as evidence. Once made, the recording can be used by supervisors to monitor the behavior of officers (police, prison guards, etc.) and it may or may not become part of a legal proceeding. Monitoring can result in exoneration from culpability; it adds information to what might otherwise be a “he said/she said” situation of competing and difficult to verify claims. But once out in the world on YouTube, these recordings become a part of a larger conversation.
As an aspect of the media culture arising from digital technologies, “the photographic” is now a sign itself deployed in ever more complex mash-ups of data from multiple sources and the still photograph is now a nearly infinitely malleable set of pixels [Ritchin]. The public is beginning to understand that the same thing can be true of video data. The cultural understanding of the photographic is parting company with our everyday social understanding of the video that we encounter in the non-art situations of surveillance video, etc. We used to be able to count on such markers as poor focus or poor resolution to help us tell the difference between social functions of the video picture. The price of higher resolution has been coming down and surveillance video is ever better (and so are the cellphone cameras that people have been using to do their own surveillance). For instance, Janis Krums’ cell phone picture of the emergency landing of an aircraft on the Hudson River, in January 2009 [Krums], is a beautiful picture with old master overtones, and not at all what we expect of a snapshot taken from a cell phone. Can the iconic sign continue to function in a world where it can be a paintbrush for a new virtual creation?
The ever-increasing quality of inexpensive video recorders is already bringing about a convergence of entertainment data streams and reportorial/documentary data streams, so it is difficult to distinguish them on the basis of their appearance. The claims of poor police, poor technicians will no longer hold up and the distinctions that finders of fact will have to make will be ever more complicated by our habitual experiences of the medium.[5]
The roughhewn handheld video output of amateurs that was imitated in a film like The Blair Witch Project and conferred on it a mark of (seeming) authenticity, has since become just a style. On the one hand, we will see that which is represented with ever greater clarity. On the other, we may be less and less able to separate one kind of video from another as other photographic media are deployed in our documentary as well as fictional lives. Where does a gigapixel photograph of Vancouver that allows us to peek into real people’s apartment windows fit? Are we spies or voyeurs or just grooving on the pleasures and powers of our digital tools? [Vancouvergigpixel]
The demanding process of creating photographs in the medium’s infancy has been replaced by technology that is small, can “remember” many pictures, and can do this at great speed, so anyone can be a photographer. Not only do average people make pictures, lots of them [Higonnet], but in urban areas especially, they are also used to being on camera in public places. Even in smaller towns, public buildings, banks, etc. are equipped with camera surveillance. Reality television, “The People’s Court” and its many offshoots, and now YouTube and other video hosting sites on the World Wide Web, present a huge variety of non-professional people in front of cameras as well as behind them. In the early days of nineteenth century photography, there was a lot of social concern about people taking pictures in public of unwilling subjects, even prior to the development of photojournalism [Jay]. The expectation of privacy has eroded – or we have all become participants. Photography has both escaped from its referents and escaped from the constraints of social boundaries. Probably inevitably, people are using available camera technologies to document abuses of power by those in authority and are thereby providing an alternative record of events. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation explored the beginning of this social change.
Police and other enforcement authorities are responding now by going after cameras demanding that people surrender their equipment, erase their memory, otherwise cease and desist exercising their legal rights to photograph in public [Schneier]. When not hostile to photography, the police are using cameras as public relations weapons themselves. They may release their own or “official” surveillance video of events in response to people’s posting their videos on the Internet to frame the debate themselves or to try to head off the unofficial version acquiring a social consensus. In some jurisdictions, police are asking citizens to post evidence of crime on special websites [NYC_311]. See for example the TSA posting of its own surveillance footage to counter the story of a disgruntled passenger [WUSA9.COM].
Courts will have to sort out different versions of evidentiary video; they will have to be interpreting what is shown and can be known from often fragmentary recording of bits of reality in different degrees of resolution and, finally, all participants may come to the court having seen all kinds of video that won’t be admitted at all but which may, nevertheless, influence their judgments. In the “olden days”, television would broadcast information about events that could wind up in the courts but television had gatekeepers. Virtually free and self-selecting video posting has changed all that. Indeed in some recent cases in the United States jurors were found to be using their hand held devices to surf the World Wide Web for additional information pertaining to their cases. [Schwartz]
Photography has become a “weapon” in info-wars carried out by opinion makers and critics, whether photo-op (as in the recent ill-advised fly-over of lower Manhattan of Air Force One) or the photoshopped (as were Iranian missiles, the wounded in Palestine) [Wald] [Morris].
We are learning to be skeptical of all official stories. Taser video enters this pictorial landscape of uncertainty. Will it seem to be especially probative given the authority of its source and its bare bones narrative? Or will it evoke a different set of cultural associations?
In Taser video we have created a tool that is, truly, a weaponized picture maker, capable of “speaking” in the real world. It is especially powerful to us because it is so semiotically rich and compelling from the combination of its photographic medium and point of view, and, let’s be honest, there is the additional pleasure of the satisfaction of our voyeuristic impulses to literally but safely “be there.” When officers deploy tasing appropriately, it can save them and others from real harms arising from dangerously uncontrolled persons. But the stun gun is a tool that can very easily be misused. Manufacturers’ claims that such devices cause no permanent harm encourage use, not just the threat of use. The fact that Electronic Control Devices leave no obvious marks makes misuse seem to have no consequences. And they are so easy to deploy. From anecdotal viewing of posted videos showing Tasers in use by police authority, it seems that these devices are often brought out to compel obedience for its own sake instead of using words either to elicit more information or to persuade. With so little communicative information in play, the human meaning is diminished. There are two recent stories, from different states, on the Web concerning the deployment of Tasers against middle-aged folks sitting in the wrong seats at ball games. Both seem like a totally unnecessary use of force [Ball_game_taser-videos].
The managerial threat of tasing described above, reminiscent of either bureaucrat or parent, is another form of normalization. “If you do not, or if you do … I will tase you….” The gun offers immediate enforcement, and immediate gratification through the assertion of power. In our society that claims to observe the rule of law, do we really want police officers not only enforcing laws but also delivering punishment without a full fact-finding procedure?