The Hub: Peter Gabriel brings us global sousveillance

Sousveillance is about to go global. Peter Gabriel is here in Oxford telling a sparsely peopled Nelson Mandela lecture theatre about his “Witness” idea which is about to go Web 2.0* with Witness - the Hub, the “wiki-MyTube” version.

“People can suffer, then very effectively have their experiences denied, buried, forgotten. But it’s much harder with video,” says Gabriel. The Rodney King episode was seminal in getting the power of video accepted. Witness wanted to provide more cameras to record human rights abuses a decade ago. “Now the phone companies have done it for us.”

Gabriel’s early insight underlines the point that artists understand the issues and opportunities underlying major technological change far sooner than governments. They can be far more articulate in expressing empathy. Witness found that to create video advocacy - video as evidence, to educate an activist audience - needs training and production as much as cameras. They intend to focus on specific three year campaigns, with measured outputs, eg child soldiers on Congo, or enslavement in Brazil.

Acronyms: 0 (or does eg count?)
Neologisms: 2
*Proprietary expressions used without permission from O’Reilly: 1

Published by William Heath on 28/03/07 at 8:23am

Comments

  1. The Witness.org website seems very slick and professional.

    However it does not seem address any of the privacy and security issues that, say, the WikiLeaks.org project is supposed to i.e. how do you upload and distribute video clips via the internet, taken in a police state or war zone, without getting yourself , or your family or associates, arrested, tortured or killed ?

    There should be tools for removing video camera or digital camera or mobile phone camera or computer specific metadata, not just tools for adding extra metadata to help classify the archive of clips.

    Some of the same questions about the ethical issues, the funding of, and possible political and legal attacks on the scheme, which are not well answered by the Wikilieaks.org project, also seem relevant to this Witness.org project

    See also the WikiLeak.org blog

    Reply by Watching Them, Watching Us  on  03/28/07  at  1:17 pm

  2. "how do you upload and distribute video clips via the internet, taken in a police state or war zone...?”

    Non-technical people use something like Dyne:Bolics Linux.

    Reply by Richard S  on  03/29/07  at  9:45 pm

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