As Iraqi TV captured the hanging of Saddam Hussein under the glare of artificial lights, someone standing below the gallows turned on their camera phone. For the bystander with the camera phone, knowing that national TV was recording the event was not enough. What was needed was a personal account recorded from the individual’s own vantage point. What was needed was the personal satisfaction of witnessing the morbid affair and then sharing that account with the world.
While U.S. editors debated whether or not audiences could stomach the finality of Saddam’s life, the shaky and grainy camera phone video blinked around the world on sites such as YouTube, Google, and Liveleak.
According to the London Times, “An almost blanket ban by television stations could not hold back the tide of people wanting to see the two-minute mobile phone footage.” In fact, within 24 hours more than a million viewers had watched the citizen-sourced account.
Camera phone images, such as the execution video, offer indisputable proof that a paradigm shift is happening in the way news is gathered, disseminated and consumed. The shift away from the legitimacy often blindly given to the mainstream media suggests the birth of a fledgling citizen-sourced news industry. In this case, the term “industry” does not necessary conform to the definition describing today’s excessively commercialized and standardized mainstream media. The camera phone video, from a sociological perspective, signifies the very human need to validate personal experience in ways outside the conventions of mainstream sources. The desire to make personal images public, as the execution video shows, is not a threat to mainstream media.
The popularity of “backdoor” citizen-sourced media should be a wakeup call to the mainstream. If mainstream media executives are paying attention, which is sometimes doubtful, they will learn that the public clamors for more transparent coverage of major news events. Instead of worrying about offending advertisers by broadcasting the grim reality of Saddam’s demise without fading to black at the moment of death or censoring the snap of a dictator’s neck, the mainstream media would best serve itself by paying attention to the demands of increasingly fragmented audiences.
The mainstream media in the United States continues to operate on the assumption that what is good for one is good for all. The whole notion of “MASS” communication is changing in a digital universe of personal media. Mass, in this sense, may no longer apply a non-specific general audience. Instead, mass may mean servicing the tastes and values of multiple audiences. The new “MASS” audience is about choice and this is where the mainstream media is falling behind.
The major networks in the reporting of Saddam’s execution got it wrong. The networks miscalculated the power of a citizen-sourced account – one that was unedited, gritty, and made more real by the fact that the motivation behind its production was transparent. In other words, people no longer trust the motives behind mainstream news gathering operations.
Unquestionably, major news outlets will continue to appropriate and commodify citizen-sourced media as a way of supplementing their own accounts. At the same, it is very unlikely that citizen-sourced media, by itself, can fully replace the need for an incessant stream of authoritative mainstream images demanded by society’s insatiable appetite for the visual.
Part II
An Analysis: A camera phone, an execution, and the death of a dictator
Warning: The content of this post may be offensive and overly graphic for some audiences.
In this analysis five citizen-sourced frames will be compared to one from the official mainstream source at Saddam's execution. The intent of this analysis is to offer greater insight into understanding human behavior in an age of visual overload. Questions such as why human beings need to record personal experiences with death, provide an entry point for further discourse about the power of the visual in our lives today.
The five frames selected for analysis represent only a fragment of the entire two-minute video. In analyzing the impact of each frame, what is missing is the continuity of the reportage -- one that is shaky, grainy, and at times poorly composed. The power of watching the citizen-sourced video is distinct from analyzing specific frames. At the same time, the process of signification is made more coherent when individual frames can be discussed.
In semiotic analysis the researcher teases out meaning in three ways.
Through the examination of the iconic, indexical, and symbolic cues found within the frame the researcher emphasizes specific issues, problems, and attributes that might otherwise be overlooked or under-examined.
Semiotic analysis, in this case, is also used to draw attention to the normative function of media images––visual messages which perpetuate and reinforce moral, social and culture values in Western society.
What needs to be understood in any analysis are the relationships between signifier and signified. In this case, the analysis might focus on the relationship between Saddam and the noose, or the lighting in the camera phone frames as compared to those of the TV coverage. Exploring the relationship between the literal and figurative meanings helps bring clarity and closure to our process of understanding the moral and ideological complexities of this world.
Once we have identifed the relationships between signifiers and what is signified we then can compare them in order to understand the persuasive determinacy of the frames.
Compare the grab frames from the camera phone video with those of the mainstream images and you will undoubtedly get two different feelings from what is presented. Notice in the Iraqi TV frame that an editor has manipulated the image to protect the identity of one of the henchman. Notice as well how the harshness of the artificial camera lights impact color while casting large shadows behind the subjects.
Research on the persuasive power of images in the media is far-reaching and continues to expand across disciplines. Cultural and visual theorists such as, William Mitchell, Julianne Newton, Victor Burgin, Pierre Bourdieu, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag, all have suggested linkages between visual messages and the shaping of social consciousness and public perception.
For example Newton, in her book, The Burden of Visual Truth notes, “A news photograph enters the public consciousness under the guise of the authority of the press: This is true. This is what happened. This is what the situation looked like…. The context has been one of assumed truth."
Caroline Brothers, author of The Spanish Civil War and War Photography in the 1930s moves this argument further:
“Meaning inheres not in the photograph itself, but in the relationship between the photograph and the matrix of culturally specific beliefs and assumptions to which it refers."
The relevancy of any possible linkage between images and mass media must be also understood from an ideological perspective. Susan Sontag argues this by pointing out how images can become deeply embedded in cultural and societal belief systems.
Sontag wrote:
“Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.”
What ideologies can be found lurking in the shadows of Saddam's execution?
The camera phone images of the execution are made from a vantage point often described as a "worm's eye view." This perspective becomes important because of the signification that comes from the sense of looking up at the subject. The vantage point, however, shift at the end of the video when Saddam is looked down upon seconds after his death. The narrative qualities of this scene, from the time the masked executors place a noose around Saddam's neck to the stillness of the dictator's face surrounded by darkness, offers a beginning and an end. The narrative arc is missing in the mainstream accounts. There is little closure in how mainstream editors stopped short of showing the actual moment of death that comes with the citizen-sourced media.
What the viewer sees from the low vantage point differs greatly from the mainstream account. Saddam's body drops through the door and into a position that moves passed eye-level into a subordinate position. The clarity of the temporal-spatial relationships of vantage points is powerful here in terms of symbolic meaning. In other words, while alive, the viewer is made to look up to Saddam, but in death he can be looked down upon. This becomes the significant distinction between the citizen-source and the mainstream reportage. What we are left with the mainstream, Iraqi TV, account is predominantly indexical meanings -- masked henchmen, heavy noose, doomed dictator. Indexical meanings are things that point toward something else. For example, the noose indicates death by hanging, and the mask signifies anonymity. What the viewer perceives is conditioned by moral, political, social, and even religious contexts. When learned conventions enter the interpretative process, symbolic meaning-making occurs. The noose, then, does not only indicate death, but also becomes symbolic of a society’s understanding of justice.
The linkages between the noose and societal justice, however, become a bit more problematic. We perceive the noose around Saddam's neck and understand his impending death. However, the secondary signification of the noose as a form of justice is more problematic. There are no perfect interpretations that will satisfy all viewers. Everyone reads meaning into things distinctly, but what the camera phone images possess is a more visceral form of reportage.
Photo Credit: AP/Nam Y. Huh
