New Article: Evans, YouTube and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Evans, Matt. “Information Dissemination in New Media: YouTube and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict.” Media, War & Conflict (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1750635216643113

 
Abstract

This work examines the ways in which YouTube videos inform audiences about international news, issues, and events. As new media increasingly becomes the public’s primary news source, research has produced conflicting contentions of how, and to whom, information is conveyed. Some studies have found Twitter and Facebook to be important tools for social organization and facilitating political involvement. Others, however, assert that these media act as echo chambers, reinforcing preexisting views rather than providing new information or perceptions. This research analyzes videos pertaining to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to reveal how they provide information. The findings show that the methods – empirical and visceral – used to frame information in YouTube videos correspond to the narratives supported by the uploaders. Additionally, the results indicate YouTube videos are watched by a heterogeneous public and have the potential to transcend selective exposure and present viewers with new information and perspectives.

 

 

Thesis: Melamed, Israeli Homemade Video Memorials and the Politics of Loss

Melamed, Laliv. Sovereign Intimacy: Israeli Homemade Video Memorials and the Politics of Loss, PhD dissertation. New York: New York University, 2015.
 
URL: http://gradworks.umi.com/37/40/3740826.html
 
Abstract

Sovereign Intimacy takes as its subject of investigation video memorialization of dead Israeli soldiers done by their close family and friends. Mixing private loss, home-made video production, military conduct, state politics, and an institutionalized commemoration, it redraws the affinities between affective intimacy and forms of governing. It delineates the reshaping of sovereignty by filial relationships, video practicing and aesthetics, state and military administration of death and mass media. Sovereign Intimacy inquires into the political currencies of mourning and loss.

The videos respond to an event triggered by operations of state violence—figured by military power—with a personal lamenting of the breaking of intimate ties. These videos are made by the family and for the family, through amateur and semi-amateur modes of production. Although they were meant to be privately circulated, this phenomenon emerged in tandem to the videos being broadcast on television during the events of the National Memorial Day.

Home-made video memorials become a standard of Israeli memorialization during the 1990s. Largely the result of waning public support of the Israeli occupation of the south of Lebanon, and of a growing disavowal of state authority, the phenomenon represented a potential challenge to hegemonic narratives and aesthetic forms, through the appropriation of memory and means of production. However, it did not make way to a new political voice to emerge. Instead, these videos emotionalized violence and victimized its deliverers. Furthermore, the broadcasting of the videos on television—allegedly as a tribute to the families, a communal gesture of listening and a call for solidarity—participated in a national economy of death in which the lives of Lebanese, Palestinians and marginalized people within Israeli society had no value. Lastly, the phenomenon of memorial videos normalized the growing militarization of civil society and neutralized any call for political action.

 

 

 

New Article: Farrell & Allan, The Politics of Citizen Videos

Farrell, Nathan, and Stuart Allan. “Redrawing Boundaries: WITNESS and the Politics of Citizen Videos.” Ethnicities (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1742766515606291

 

Abstract

This article engages with several pressing issues revolving around ‘citizen witnessing’, with specific reference to the human rights advocacy group, WITNESS. In the course of tracing WITNESS’ development over the past two decades, it offers an evaluative assessment of the challenges its members have faced in promoting a grassroots, citizen-centred approach to video reportage. More specifically, this advocacy is informed by an ethical commitment to advancing human rights causes by equipping citizens in crisis situations with cameras, and the training to use them, so that they might bear witness to the plight of others. In so doing, this article argues, WITNESS offers a tactical reformulation of the guiding tenets of peace journalism, one with considerable potential for recasting anew its strategic priorities.

 

 

 

 

New Article: Hagin & Wagner, A Deleuzian Analysis of Videos from the Israeli Occupation

Hagin, Boaz and Roy Wagner. “The Occupation-Image: A Deleuzian Analysis of Videos from the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.” Journal of Film and Video 66.4 (2014): 19-33.

 

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_film_and_video/v066/66.4.hagin.html

 

Excerpt

b’tselem (hebrew for “in the image of” ), the Israeli information center for human rights in the occupied territories, is one of Israel’s most prominent human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Founded in 1989, its goal is to document and educate about human rights violations in the occupied territories, to combat denial among the Israeli public about what goes on in the territories, and to ensure that Israel’s government “protects the human rights of residents there and complies with its obligations under international law” (“About B’Tselem”).

In 2005, B’Tselem established a video department and added moving images to its human rights reports. In this article we look mainly at two groups of videos distributed by B’Tselem. One is the video reports by B’Tselem’s researchers, which document Israeli violations of the human rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories and which B’Tselem has been making since 2005. The second is videos that were made as part of B’Tselem’s camera distribution project. Launched at the beginning of 2007, this project provides Palestinians with video cameras in order to document their lives under the occupation themselves (“B’Tselem’s Camera Project”). B’Tselem’s videos have been posted on its website (“Video”) and YouTube channel (“B’Tselem: Video”), and some of them have garnered considerable public interest, although they have received almost no attention within film studies. Some of the videos have been circulated by the Israeli and international media.

B’Tselem and the media frequently see these moving images as representations of facts that lie behind the images, coded in terms of human rights and national conflict. This is indeed the chief interest of NGOs such as B’Tselem as well as the police, the courts, and the media. In this article, we would like to put these issues in parentheses and argue that what the images show is not reducible to such an account.

The media discourse surrounding these videos has frequently focused on facts and on issues of objectivity and relations between the people involved, such as the ethics of depicting the suffering of others, self-representation, and the degree to which filmmakers can and should intervene in the lives and deaths of those they depict. According to the videos’ supporters, the media attention and public pressure have encouraged Israelis to raise questions about settlers in the occupied territories; impelled the Israeli police and military police to conduct investigations that might not have been opened based only on spoken or written testimony from Palestinians; and sometimes resulted in arrests and convictions. Moreover, according to B’Tselem and its advocates, the presence of cameras can be a powerful deterrent and has reduced settler and army violence while offering an empowering form of nonviolent resistance for Palestinians. Critics have asked whether B’Tselem gives a fair and impartial picture of events in the territories (and whether it is biased against Israel or even “anti-Semitic”); whether the making of the videos puts the Palestinian photographers, especially children, in danger; and whether the project has any long-term impact beyond the initial media interest.