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

Tue Jul 12 03:58:03 AEST 2016

Diamond Reynold’s live video breaks through a certain threshold possibly because of the auteur-like first person narration— it’s not just that she’s filming the execution but she is also speaking to both save her own life and that of her child in the back seat, and also to reason with the police officer in order to direct the course of events in the film - in reality — to literally change the reality.  Like everyone else I watched this video as soon as it emerged at 2 am last Friday and it put me into a vigil-like state, a stunned fixation, I”m sure there are millions of us all in this state… So what’s happening here… functioning as a freeze point on collective memory, a point of pain so extreme, we are all there with Diamond, we are shooting video with her, we are calm with her, we are in her ‘personal content’.   

I thought, instantly of the iconic Accidental Napalm photograph by Nick Ut (1972) — nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, in the center,  is running towards Nick,  naked, having ripped off her burning clothes after she was splashed by napalm. 

As ‘raw data’ or ‘life visualization’ — as with the Viet Nam napalm photograph, Diamond’s video moves as close to Bare Life as can possibly be borne (born).  Intersecting and sutured into the video my screen-shaped eyes inhale the blast through the retina and straight into the brain’s centers of mutual pain— pain blasting  on the differential so close to  an accumulation of data points via a frame rate,  as if accelerated to infinity, so fast it reaches through our separate skins— we all strip and are stripped bare. 

FB’s dilemma of seeking ‘personal’ content for its greater monetization reaches a gamma value — they want a differential (delta value) to predict greater ad revenue, presumed to be keyed to personal lifestyle expression.  ISIS et al
have already conflated such expression with horror in a politics that exactly destroys the polis at this point of pain.  

But this gamma value makes a flip. 

The staging of execution (as in ISIS videos), or the denial-laden police footage from oops-it-was-malfunctioning cop-worn body cams, are share-able visualizations but they do not enter a realm of world-framing, as Diamond Reynold’s video does. 

That’s the flip. 

Her video literally pleads for her/its/our life. At any moment her/it/our life will be shut down.  She/it/we will be killed.  The witness will be the four-year-old daughter.  Diamond is (to borrow from a book title on Reyner Banham), ‘the historian of the immediate future.’ 

Katherine writes: 

"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. “

and 

"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.” 

see also  https://vietnamiconicphotos.wordpress.com/tag/my-lai-massacre/   by Angie Lovelace 

Christina McPhee
naxsmash at mac.com

http://christinamcphee.net

> On Jul 11, 2016, at 5:54 PM, Katherine Behar <kb at katherinebehar.com> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
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