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We're All Under the Microscope Now

Posted on: Friday, 29 December 2006, 03:00 CST

By ANDREW GUMBEL

William Cardenas can thank YouTube for saving his bacon. In August, Cardenas, a 23-year-old kid from Hollywood, was picked up by two Los Angeles patrol cops and booked for resisting arrest. They claimed he was a gang member wanted for handling stolen goods. The judge who heard the case at a preliminary hearing in September believed them, consigning Cardenas to pre-trial custody.

A few weeks later, though, the tables were turned. An amateur video of the arrest surfaced on YouTube, the quintessential new- generation video-streaming website, and a new story emerged. The footage, taken by a resident near where the arrest took place, shows Cardenas flailing helplessly on the ground with the knee of Officer Patrick Farrell pressed on his neck. Cardenas gasps: "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" Farrell responds by punching him repeatedly in the face.

The video had an electrifying effect, not least because of its echoes of Rodney King's videotaped beating at the hands of four white patrol cops and the chain of events that led from there to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The Federal Bureau of Investigation immediately opened an inquiry into the LAPD's behaviour in the Cardenas case. The LAPD went into damage-limitation mode as the chief, William Bratton, described the footage as "disturbing" but urged people not to jump to conclusions. The stolen goods charge against Cardenas was dropped, apparently for lack of evidence. The courts promised a new hearing to decide whether the felony charge of resisting arrest should stand or be thrown out.

Cardenas himself leapt out of obscurity to tell his side of the story, describing how he was treated in hospital for a black eye, a split lip and other injuries and denying that he was a gang member at all. He evolved, in other words, from a nobody at the mercy of an unforgiving criminal justice system to part of the pop cultural landscape and an object of public sympathy. As he himself put it, in one of his television interviews: "Without the video, it's their word against my word." With the video... well, at least he has a fighting chance.

The internet continues to cause difficulties for law enforcement in LA. Soon after the Cardenas tape, a year-old video surfaced on YouTube of a transient on Venice Beach getting pepper-sprayed even after he had been handcuffed and bundled into a patrol car. And then the blogosphere was treated to video footage taken on a mobile phone of an Iranian American student at the University of California in Los Angeles getting "Tasered" over and over by campus police after he failed to produce a student ID card in a library.

These are incidents with enormous implications, not only for the LA police but for all of us, and for the conduct of modern life. It is growing ever harder to cover up public acts, either by spinning them or pretending they never happened, for the simple reason that at any moment those acts might be recorded and disseminated with little more required than a USB plug-in and a few clicks of a mouse.

In the United States, the 2006 mid-terms are being talked of as the first YouTube election - not only because that was one platform on which campaigns were both waged and followed, but also because YouTube altered the course, and possibly the outcome, of at least one pivotal race. George Allen was cruising towards a second six- year term as a Republican Senator from Virginia, and was even contemplating a run at the presidency, when, at a summer campaign event, he turned on a volunteer videographer working for his Democratic challenger and called him "macaca", a clear insult and an apparent reference to the fact that he had dark skin. With his indiscretion quickly exposed to all, Allen could-n't live down his "macaca" moment from then to polling day. In 2006, the foolishness and incompetence of political candidates gained national exposure and, often, ridicule.

President Bush himself got caught up in the YouTube phenomenon. At the end of April, the television satirist Stephen Colbert gave the keynote address at the annual White House correspondents' dinner and roasted the President - and the press corps - in the guise of his screen persona, a forthright but clueless right-wing television talk-show host. The room went deathly quiet as Colbert delivered his barbs. One attendee, Richard Cohen, later wrote at great length about how unfunny Colbert was. But then a video of the speech went viral on YouTube, earning Colbert lavish praise as not only the funniest political satirist in America, but also the bravest. Nora Ephron, the film director, said the speech was proof that it was "possible for a comedian to utterly kill and bomb at the same time". In the internet age, it now is.

There is almost no sphere of life that isn't being affected by user-generated internet content of all kinds, whether it is videos on YouTube or photographs, personal messages, and networks of friends hooking up on MySpace and its rival sites. Sports fans can now access their favourite action moments, and use the pause button on YouTube's Flash video technology to agonise about referees' calls. Music fans can watch live clips, with stereo sound. Businesses are finding innovative uses for the new outlet almost daily: in the United States, estate agents take video footage of properties they're selling and upload them for public consumption.

The media landscape is being transformed. Who needs to watch a late-night chat show or comedy programme when the good bits will be posted on a video-streaming site within hours? YouTube boasts 100 million video viewings a day - numbers to intimidate even the most robust of network stations with sure-fire hits to lure advertisers. That helps to explain why Rupert Murdoch, who sat out the first round of the internet revolution, was so quick to snap up MySpace, or why a consortium of media moguls, including Murdoch, is planning to set up a rival site to YouTube, which has itself just been bought by Google. Intellectual property lawyers will be kept busy for years, as sites either try to assert copyright over certain material or clamour for the right to broadcast whatever they can find, regardless of ownership.

We can also expect a transformation in the relationship, as we understand it, between private and public space. YouTube may be only one year old, but the change has been going on for some time. A couple of decades ago, a night out was just a night out. It didn't matter too much who got drunk, or made a clumsy pass, or started a moronic argument; by morning it was all forgotten. A year or two ago, that sense of responsibility-free down time was already compromised by the ubiquity of BlackBerrys and other wireless devices. Fewer sights are stranger, to someone who came of age in the 1980s, than a darkened dancefloor packed with 25-year-olds fingering their glow-in-the-dark BlackBerrys and taking regular breaks from dancing to fire off an e-mail.

Now, the sense of interconnectivity has intensified. Go to a bar in New York or Washington or Los Angeles catering to college-age customers, and you'll see them obsessively recording everything on mobile-phone cameras and pocket video recorders, to be uploaded to MySpace, YouTube or some other site the next morning. Everything has become a communal experience, or has the potential to become one.

That's not always a comfortable realisation, especially for the generation that remembers life before the internet. When Michael Richards, the comic actor best known for playing Kramer on Seinfeld, hurled a stream of racist invective at two black hecklers during a stand-up routine in Los Angeles, he might have assumed the indiscretion would be soon forgotten. Indeed, management at the Laugh Factory welcomed him back the following night. But then footage of the incident aired on the entertainment-based streaming site TMZ.com, it became a national scandal, and TV stations showed his "nigger" tirade again and again.

It is no coincidence that Los Angeles is the origin of many of these new trends. It is, after all, a city where visual imagery holds a rare power - whether as a check on reality, or as a way of creating a mythological alternative to it. Now LA is being super- saturated by that imagery, first because digital video technology is everywhere, and second because of the ease of uploading that video to the internet. And where Los Angeles leads, the rest of the world is rapidly following.

The change has come in two stages. The first, 15 years ago or so, was the emergence of mass-market camcorders and rolling television news. (Before, film footage of signature events - like the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination - was a rarity and a fluke.) The Rodney King beating was, of course, the signature moment of that era. Without the video footage, there would have been no trial of the four cops who beat King, and no acquittal to trigger the LA riots a year later. Nobody would have been inspired to set up new video-conscious watchdog groups like Copwatch. Peter Gabriel wouldn't have set up his group Witness, which distributed video cameras to human rights activists around the world to shed light in dark places.

At the time, the King affair felt like an earthquake, even if by today's standards it seems quaint and slow, like dial-up in a broadband world. George Holliday, the amateur videographer who shot the footage from his balcony, first tried to take it to his local police station. Then he knocked on CNN's door, but got no reply. It took him a couple of days to find a taker - the local television news station KTLA - and for the rest of the world to sit up and take notice. Holliday, in other words, was at the mercy of someone else's editorial decision-making. In the internet age, the journey from recording to public airing is much quicker. As there are no obstacles to publication, the footage is often much more raw. The Holliday tape may have been blurry and hard to follow, but it is a model of clarity compared with the partial views and cacophony of voices that show up on YouTube. For some people, this lack of quality is an issue. The LAPD argues that citizen videos offer only a partial view of what might be a complex situation. The LAPD has started installing its own video recording devices in patrol cars so that it can, in some cases, offer a contrary view of the same event. In many ways, these developments are healthy. It is better that the power of the media be dispersed among ordinary citizens as well as held by public agencies and big conglomerates. A few years ago, it was fashionable to bemoan the diminishing importance of the written word and the rise of the image as the defining force of our culture. The film director Godfrey Reggio (of Koyaanisqatsi fame) once argued to me that it was impossible to engage critically with images. He might feel differently if he saw some of the police brutality videos, with their cacophony of voices, partial views and off- camera screams.

Isn't a critical intelligence exactly what it takes to make sense of those images? Forty years ago, Michelangelo Antonioni explored the uncertainty of visual knowledge in Blow-Up, as his photographer protagonist magnifies a single image over and over in the hope that it might reveal a murder being committed in a London park. The joke, of course, is that a remade version of Blow-Up for the digital age would be a 10-minute short - all that developing and magnifying and examining could be achieved in seconds on a computer.

Still, the nature of what we see, and what the imagery tells us about the world in which we live, remains as complicated and mysterious now as it was in 1966. It's just coming at us a whole lot faster, and from every conceivable direction.

Source: Independent, The; London (UK)

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