Anna Reading

Mobile Witnessing: Ethics and the Camera Phone in the ‘War on Terror’

Some of the first images rapidly circulated globally in news media of the London Bombings on 7 July 2005 were taken by non-journalists using mobile camera phones. This paper explores some of the ethical issues raised by mobile phone witnessing in the ‘war on terror’. The article uses a performative approach to witnessing in which mobile testimony is seen in terms of performances and speech acts between different parties, including mute witnesses, the survivor witness and the witness(es) to the survivor (s). The approach enables us to see the significance of global mobilities and mobilizations in relation to ethics and mobile witnessing, rather than focusing only the ethics associated with the discrete mobile witness image itself. The article examines some of the global virtual traces and data trajectories on the World Wide Web associated with a mobile camera phone image taken by a witness survivor, Adam Stacey in the 7 July 2005 London Bombings. This suggests that mobile witnessing involves a fluid and travelling involvement in data capture, data sharing, and receipt, through global networks mobilized through multiple mobilities. Mobile witnessing has trajectories across and moments of emplacement between the self and the other, the individual and the group, the private and the public, the citizen and the professional journalist, the living body and the machine. In traversing the ordinary and the extraordinary, speech and speechlessness, mobile witnessing can involve engagement beyond mere spectatorship, establishing new ways of recording events in the ‘war on terror’. Algunas de las primeras imágines que circularon globalmente en las noticias sobre las bombas que estallaron en Londres el 7 de Julio de 2005, fueron tomadas por gente que no trabajaba en los medios, usando la cámara de sus celulares. Este documento explora algunos de los incidentes éticos suscitados a raíz del testimonio obtenido mediante celulares en la ‘guerra contra el terror’. El artículo usa un enfoque performativo para evaluar el testimonio de los testigos móviles, el cual es visto en términos de actuaciones y acciones de palabra entre las diferentes partes, que incluyen testigos mudos, el testigo sobreviviente y el(los) testigo(s) del(los) sobreviviente(s). El enfoque nos permite ver la trascendencia de la movilidad global y las movilizaciones en relación a la ética y al testimonio móvil, en vez de concentrarnos solamente en la ética asociada por sí misma con una imagen testimonial móvil discreta. El artículo examina algunos trazos virtuales globales y trayectorias de datos en Internet asociados con una imagen de una cámara de celular tomada por un testigo sobreviviente, Adam Stacey durante las bombas que estallaron en Londres, el 7 de julio de 2005. Esto sugiere que el testimonio móvil conlleva una participación dinámica y ambulante en la captura, intercambio y recibo de datos, a través de redes globales movilizadas a través de múltiples movilidades. El testimonio móvil tiene trayectorias a todo lo ancho y momentos de emplazamiento entre el uno y el otro, el individuo y el grupo, lo privado y lo público, el ciudadano y el periodista profesional, el ser humano y la máquina. Recorriendo lo ordinario y lo extraordinario, la comunicación hablada y el mutismo, el testimonio móvil puede implicar un compromiso más allá de simple espectador, estableciendo nuevas formas de grabar eventos en la ‘guerra contra el terror’.

Digital interactivity in public memory institutions: the uses of new technologies in Holocaust museums

Historical events and social memories are increasingly articulated and accessed through the means of interactive digital technologies. Particularly in the context of history museums, interactive digital media kiosks and web-sites are used to enhance and in some cases constitute a key way in which the past is conveyed to the public. Yet in what ways are new technologies in such contexts constructing a different relationship to the past and how are visitors themselves using these technologies? This article uses empirical research from the Museum of Tolerance in the US to critically situate and theorize the uses of new technologies in relation to socially inherited memories of the Holocaust.

The London Bombings: Mobile Witnessing, Mortal Bodies and Globital Time

Most cultural theorists argue that time in the digital and globalized media era is accelerating, with the future and past collapsed into an extended present. This would seem to be the case with the 2005 London bombings: mobile witnessing through the use of mobile camera phones provided co-present personal communicative memory of the events by survivors and witnesses. This was rapidly transformed by mainstream media organizations into mediated witnessing which within days was being reassembled as part of a process of commemoration through online memorials. More than five years on from the terrorist attacks, however, there is an unevenness in the trajectories of mobile witnessing over time in what may be termed the ‘globital memory field’. As well as compression and speed, ‘globital time’ is folded to intersect with ‘slow’ and ‘long’ time that is very much part of each citizen’s lifeworld and subsequently is an important dimension within any process of commemoration, conflict resolution and justice.

Identity, memory and cosmopolitanism: The otherness of the past and a right to memory?

Implicated within the relationship between memory and identities at the local, national and international levels is the question of whether there is ‘right to memory’: the human right to have the otherness of the past acknowledged through the creation of symbolic and cultural acts, utterances and expressions. This article outlines the rationale for a right to memory and why the debate is of importance to memory and cultural studies. It outlines some of the relationships understood between memory and identity within memory studies, suggesting that a right to memory requires an understanding of the complex dynamics of memory and identities not only within, but internationally across, borders. It extends the concept of political cosmopolitanism to use as an analytical framework to enable an analysis of current international protocols, showing how they formulate the discursive relationship between identity and memory in four ways that involve a number of contradictions and unresolved tensions.

The journalist as memory assembler : non-memory, the War on Terror and the shooting of Osama Bin Laden

Boylan reviews Journalism and Memory edited by Barbie Zelizer and Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt.News of the shooting by US security forces of the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, was broken via the micro-blogging site, Twitter. The event was significant in terms of marking a watershed in the intersecting practices of mobile and social media with journalism, with the Bin Laden story ‘marking a new reference point’ in media coverage (Filloux, 2011).

Memobilia: The Mobile Phone and the Emergence of Wearable Memories

In the science fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time, first published in 1976, Marge Piercy envisaged a future society in which the characters would have ‘kenners’, mobile communication and personal memory prosthetics strapped to the wrist and connected to a world wide electronic network. In March 2006, Piercy’s kenner, in effect, became a reality when Nokia announced its 4G mobile phone designed to strap to the user’s wrist.

Globital time : time in the digital globalised age

The traditional playground game of generations of children ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ anticipates a metaphor for time that is neither teleological nor digitally networked, but expressed dynamically in terms of folding. If it is Two O’clock, Three O’clock, Four O’clock or any other O’clock, the players may creep towards the big bad Wolf, who has her back turned, with the aim of touching the wall first. But, if the wolf turns and howls that it is ‘Dinner Time’, the players shriek and run like hell to escape being eaten, and the horror of becoming the big bad Wolf themselves. Children delight most not in O’ clock Time but in weathering the consequences of the unpredictable Dinner Time. The enjoy the moment of devouring, of terror, of pleasure and fulfilment (for the wolf); of fearful transformation, of the process of becoming for the losing player, and of rapid movement that is not pinned to a particular time, but is experienced as anytime or perhaps all times folded together. This tumultuous, changing and dynamic sense of time, is perhaps why the philosopher Michel Serres delights in the fact that in French the word for time (temps) is the same word for weather (1995).1

Seeing red : a political economy of digital memory

This article intervenes into research on cultural and digital memory by arguing for the significance of the materiality of memory and its underlying political economy. Although cultural and digital memories are characterized as contested, multiple and often involving interplay and conflict between different power dynamics, what remains missing is an understanding of the material basis of digital, globally connective memory or what is termed here ‘globital memory’. In work on memory which addresses social and mobile technologies there is an emphasis on the transition from collective to ‘connective memory’ and the ways in which social media offer possibilities for the articulation of marginalized memories, as well as new forms of archiving. While current concern is signalling a return to the question of the significance of ‘mass media’ in relation to social and mobile media and digital memory, this work does not yet address the political economy of ‘globital’ memory which includes the underlying materiality and technical infrastructure of social media. Using the conceptual metaphor of mining memories, the article will attend to what lies beneath the ‘digital skin’ of memories on social networks such as YouTube. I address the socioeconomic and technical infrastructures that enable the capture, circulation and storage of data that then become the raw material of globital memory.

The materiality of globital memory: bringing the cloud to earth

The cloud is a metaphor that helps to obscure the material realities that rest beneath our digital memories. However, a number of scholars in memory studies have suggested that cultural memory has always had a material basis and some, though limited, scholarly attention has already considered the toxic by-products and unethical practices involved in mining minerals that are used in making digital memories. This article draws on earlier work on the materiality of cultural memory as well as Tsings (Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, 2005) concept of ‘friction’ in global commodity chains to help analyse our own empirical research in Australia and Malaysia that looks at the production of rare earth minerals, whose use in making digital communication technologies is not widely known. Our analysis concludes that that not all citizens are equally bearing the burden of the risks and damages caused by our growing desire and addiction for information and communication gadgets and digital memory. We argue that any conceptualization of digitized and globalized or ‘globital memory’ must resist metaphors, narratives and concepts that attempt to remove digital memory from its material consequences; to do this scholars must incorporate an understanding of memorys materialism into their research, rather than focusing predominantly or exclusively on its energetic or ‘virtual’ properties.

The European Roma : an unsettled right to memory

Exposing how memory is constructed and mediated in different societies, this collection explores particular contexts to identify links between the politics of memory, media representations and the politics of justice, questioning what we think we know and understand about recent history. [Book summary from WorldCat]