How the smartphone and social media have weaponized public spaces

The Faustian contract of ethics-free-citizen journalism

1). Video as Evidence.
On a Spring evening in Los Angeles in 1991, George Holliday heard screaming. He looked out of his balcony window to see police brutally beating a driver. Holliday grabbed his video recorder and filmed the attack. This video was later introduced as evidence in the trial of Rodney King against the Los Angeles Police Department. This video was seen by millions of people and served as tangible and irrefutable proof of police brutality.

Thirty-one years later almost everyone has a device on them that can capture the images, sounds, and events that happen around them, and instantly share them with a wide audience.

These user-generated videos have captured incidents of police brutality, and criminal activity, but they have also been used to capture every day, occasionally uncivil behavior of others in public. The popularity of these videos has created an outlet for public shaming and the opportunity for provocateurs to manufacture confrontations solely for the purpose of content creation, often at the expense of an unwilling subject.

Video as unreliable “evidence”
A woman spotted a man she had never seen before with a spray paint can spraying paint on the concrete wall next to her home in San Francisco. She walked up to the young man who was spraypainting “Black Lives Matter” on the wall and asked him, who he was and what he was doing. The young man picked up his phone, turned on the video recorder, and began to record what happened next. The incident became a viral video and the woman was instantly labeled a ‘Karen”, a derogatory slang term first coined on the internet message board Reddit in 2017 for a woman, usually white, who is acting in a way others perceive as entitled or privileged. The woman (Charnock 2020) found herself and her business “doxxed” a term meaning her private information was shared on social media including her address and the name of her business for the crime of asking a man why he was spray-painting a wall.

I do not know the intent of her actions but neither do the millions of people who saw the video and it’s likely the person who filmed the incident knows either. I am not defending or condemning her or the filmmakers' actions. But it’s important to ask the question and consider did the punishment fit the “crime”? What intrinsic value to society is it to see this unpleasant exchange? And is polarizing public opinion and hostility based on limited information ultimately doing more harm than good? And most importantly: do we want a society where anything you do, might be filmed anywhere at any time without consent, edited, and framed in such a manner to humiliate and shame the subject and last for years on the internet?

The rhetorical stance
There are 294.5 million smartphones in the United States (Kolmar 2021) and 4.48 billion users of social media (Dean 2021) apps like Tik Tok, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. One need only look at the most popular video feeds on any given day and will find video clips of people, mostly women, engaged in hostile, unhinged behavior. These video clips, buried in between the dance challenge, cute kittens, and puppies, often contain the voice of a narrator, often a young male editorializing the exchange. A search of the term “Karen” yields 362,000,000 results on Google alone. And the “Karens” are not the only people finding their unwanted fame on social media, “Darren’s” the male version of Karen’s; “Public Freakouts” and passengers being recorded while on rides in rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft are uploaded every day to TikTok and Snapchat and eventually find their way to YouTube and Facebook in compilation videos.

These videos also have a mainstream appeal as an entire sub-genre of people being drunk or arguing with flights attendants is so popular, that the Travel Channel has created an entire series about these incidents.

Since the global pandemic of 2020, more and more of these videos have appeared fueled mostly by confrontations involving the refusal to wear masks. Often these confrontations are provoked and staged by the person refusing to wear the mask and they will enter public spaces without a mask and proclaim it to be a political statement knowing the incident will likely be filmed and go “viral”, a term used for a video clip that gets many viewers and is widely shared in various social media channels.

The average operator of a video camera and social media account is unaware and not held responsible to the level of a real journalist. However, social media platforms like Citizen, NextDoor, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, WeChat, Discord, Snapchat, and Instagram have become ethics-free-citizen journalism zones. The view does not know if this incident was staged if the person being filmed was provoked if the individual being filmed is having a breakdown. One cannot know but nevertheless, an opinion is made. Without context, the viewer is enticed into taking action and forming an opinion of the person or situation being filmed without the broader contextualization or understanding of what exactly is happening or what circumstances led up to the moment being filmed.

So much of the technology that has been unleashed on the world is amazing and empowering. Without video evidence, Rodney King’s brutal attack would have been yet another unknown story that is sadly all too common. But filming someone having a tantrum over their chicken nuggets is not an act of asymmetrical justice. It is not the same as filming an act of police brutality and it’s time to make that distinction. We face living in a society where we may be afraid to partake in the public commons for fear we may be filmed.

The Faustian bargain we strike is that these tools can also be used as weapons. Anthropologist Faye Ginsberg writes about “the parallax effect”, this is the idea that the meaning of a visual subject changes depending on who is filming the subject and by extension, the cultural angle from which the viewer is looking at it. The viewer of any media brings their own baggage, assumptions, and judgments just as the person who filmed it is looking through the lens of the way they intend someone else to feel about it. Just because something seems and feels objective and truthful doesn’t mean it necessarily is.

References
Charnock, Matt. 2020. “SF ‘Karen’ Filmed Confronting Pacific Heights Man Over Writing ‘Black Lives Matter’ on His Property.” SFist. https://sfist.com/2020/06/14/sf-karen-filmed-confronting-pacific-heights-man-over-writing-black-lives-matter-on-his-property/.

Dean, Brian. 2021. “How Many People Use Social Media in 2021? (65+ Statistics).” Backlinko. https://backlinko.com/social-media-users.

Kolmar, Chris. 2021. “US Smartphone Industry Statistics [2021]: Facts, Growth, Trends, And Forecasts — Zippia.” Zippia. https://www.zippia.com/advice/us-smartphone-industry-statistics/.