[occupy] Public Service and Sousveillance in the Age of Internet

[flamingsword]

So the Oakland police almost killed a Marine last Tuesday night by lobbing a flashbang into the crowd of people pulling him away from the front line where he'd been struck in the head by a rubber bullet.That event is worrisome for several reasons including being in direct violation of Oakland's civic policies. And other Marines are not happy about it. You do not fire on noncombatants. Also, you don't mess with a Marine.

Youtube has only existed since 2005. Police who've been on the force since before 2006 (which is most of them) did not sign on to be policemen where the world could see. Their corporate culture has failed to adapt to the changing information landscape of our culture, and instead of getting with the times, several places have resorted to unconstitutionally using anti-eavesdropping laws to circumvent the First Amendment right to freedom of expression which covers journalists and people documenting public affairs. Image-sharing across social media and Youtube along with live streaming video sites such as Qik, Livecast, and Stickam have changed the ability of people to effectively block law enforcement's ability to silence their testimony. When you can document wrongdoing digitally, conflict between police narratives and eyewitness statements can be bypassed in favor of easier-to-correlate and much-harder-to-fabricate data.

Sousveillance is the natural social response to imbalances of power in a media-technology saturated environments. It has more applications than keeping public officials accountable, though, and is part of a trend of radical honesty where people document the seemingly unimportant events in their lives in the experimental art of learning to stop self-censoring. It is part of how we're learning to be more honest with ourselves and learning that while simple mistakes are common and easily apologized for, it's not worthwhile to do things that we might be ashamed of later. OPD: for future reference, as a tactical move, that was better for our side than yours, but we both lost. Maybe try something more proportional next time?

To our comrades in Oakland tonight, police and occupiers: I wish you luck and good judgement.

Comments

Oakland

[nyyki.livejournal.com]

I had a friend at the Oakland protest, and he told me what went on. He got hit three times by beanbags, advised a guy not to pick up a flash-bang because it was very hot, (the guy was going to throw it back at the police) and told me about seeing the marine get hit. He reported all of this on Facebook while it was going on.
What's getting my attention in this is the disconnect between the media and the reports of people on the streets at the time of the protest using social media and broadcast web access to do reportage from their POV. It's showing how biased some of the media outlets are, especially the cable news peddlers. I'm starting to think that this is a bigger deal than the points the Occupy folks are talking about, as it has the power to undermine an instution that until now people have generally trusted.I've always known that the information age would undermine the big music companies, publishers, and video companies, but it didn't occur to me until now that it might also take down big media.

Re: Oakland

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

In the new age, WE are the media. And the protesting of official news outlets being in bed with major financial and political interests and misinforming the population are part of what's being protested.