[-empyre-] What do Police Violence and Facebook Live mean for Feminist Data Visualization?

[Katherine Behar]

Hello again, 

So, given all that I just laid out in my previous message, I’d like to share some very incomplete thoughts concerning the heartbreaking onslaught of police violence and extrajudicial killing here in the US, and how feminist data visualization, or at least my reading of it, may or may not apply in this context. I am wrestling with this and have no answers, but it's hard for me to think about much else at this time. I’d love to invite a discussion.

As my last post explains, I am skeptical of data visualization’s truth claims and critical of its generativity in a moment when I think overproduction is running rampant. Here’s a sketch of my current thinking about how this is playing out in recent events:

In the context of police violence, when I think about data vis strictly speaking, projects like the Washington Post’s Fatal Force, an interactive visualization of a database of people shot by police by year, come to mind [See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/]. I think this is a great project, but I question how effective it is if one is to engage it not neutrally as reportage (which is The Post’s job as journalists), but rather from a feminist perspective with explicit political interests in reducing shootings and violence. It goes without saying that I am glad that this visualization makes information accessible and coherent. But it is an open question whether producing more visualizations like this helps the feminist and antiracist political cause. 

In a less strict sense of visualization, I’ve also been thinking about Facebook Live videos, which present an interesting, and far less clearcut case. The now viral Facebook Live video posted by Diamond Reynolds, broadcasting the aftermath of her boyfriend Philando Castile’s shooting, is a politically powerful visualization of the event. (And even if it’s a stretch to think of this event as “live data,” it is precisely its “rawness” as data “raw given” that would/will quickly become obscured as data in visualizations like the above or in the bureaucracy of legal procedures to come.) I think this video does important work in broadcasting data, with the critical political effect of mobilizing solidarities. 

But others have critiqued the efficacy of cellphone videos of police shootings and violence on similar grounds as my critique of the Post’s visualization above. I’ve watched too many videos and read too many articles in the last few days to remember the citations, but several activists have argued that the visibility of the shootings doesn’t helped Philando Castile or Alton Sterling—or so many others. I can appreciate this argument. Are we just producing and circulating content? To what end?

In addition, it’s important to note that the impetus for creating Facebook Live video technology is a direct result of overproduction. I’m currently starting to work on a project about “context collapse,” which is a concern of FB’s. Because people’s friend networks are becoming so large, the personal context for communication is ‘collapsing’ and users are posting more links and less personal content. In fact, the rapid sharing of Reynold’s video link is an example if this dynamic. FB is trying to get people to post more personal content through features like “On this Day” and “Facebook Live” videos. In this case I would suggest that FB is using Live video to fix a “problem” with overproduction through more overproduction. My concern is that the greater context of overproduction will end up hindering political effectiveness. 

These are open questions and I would be curious to hear thoughts from the list.

Best, 
Katherine