 Good afternoon. I'm Jim Parity, one of the members of the steering committee, but I have to say congratulations and thanks and my admiration for Professor Manning who has put this material together and created a great conference for us all and we're all sitting here learning from each other and so thanks Ken. We're at the end of the conference and my dear friend and close friend William Eurikio is going to be talking about on the subject of the forensic citizen and the subtitle of his talk is learning from the past and preparing for the future. I'm looking forward to this event because William is someone who thinks about these areas in media continually and very creatively. He's one of the founders of the CMS program at MIT. He's also the founder of MIT's open documentary lab and he's co-authored a new volume with Kat Seizek that's titled Collective Wisdom Co-creating Media for Equity and Justice. So it's a tremendous subject that is spot on for this conference and this publication will be launched in a couple of weeks in Amsterdam and New York. William is a historian of media who revisits the histories of old media when they were new, explores interactive and participatory documentary. He writes about the past and future of television, thinks about algorithms and archives and researches narrative in immersive and interactive settings. He's a professor of comparative media studies at MIT. He's also been a professor at many other institutions around the world, certainly in Europe and the US including Utrecht where he holds another position. He's been a visiting professor at the Free University in Berlin at Stockholm University and China University of Science and Technology. He's won many awards. He's done fellowships, Guggenheim fellowships and is the recipient of the Berlin Prize and his publications include reframing culture, we Europeans, media representations, identities, another media cultures, yet another many more lives of Batman and the soon-to-appear Collective Wisdom volume. So William has been present in the media research area for many, many years. What's interesting is media is really one of the tremendous subjects of our time and we're beginning to see it feeding a kind of world back to us that for many people is surprising but it's been there for a long time. So I want to welcome William and ready to listen to his presentation on the frenzied citizen. Thank you. Thank you for those kind words Jim and I have to say it's been an amazing two days this is kind of the as Jim said as you know the end of the arc. I will be much shorter than promised this will not be an hour and 15 minutes don't worry about that but I have to say I've been moved by what I've heard I mean emotionally touched by some of it inspired by some of it blown away by by some of what I've seen it's been a remarkable two days and I'm really indeed honored to be here and because this is only going to get more extended with each last person Ken. Ken Manning is an amazing figure and I'm sure you've all gotten to see him around he's the one person who's not been at this podium for the course of the conference but he's been behind everything that happens. Ken is a magician of making things happen while kind of sitting back and watching it play out and I'm I've learned a lot I've learned a lot from Ken precisely with this kind of thing among other things he's a wise man and I'm so grateful that he had the wisdom to pull this off the fortitude to pull it off it was not an easy task as you can tell if you've been to any of our our normal conferences this is being done at a much higher level and I'm it's a testament to Ken's ability and also this is it this is a topic that we need to address as as fulsomely as possible I'm also impressed by the array of the of the speakers I don't know that I've been recently at a conference at MIT with all with five continents represented I mean there are folks from Asia Australia Europe South America North America it's it's amazing it's a it's not the usual siloed conic but disciplinary conference that I spend my days going to this are this you know as you guys know from having met one another people from quite different areas from quite different positions in the academic hierarchy and from outside it so just to say it's been terrific and the keynotes have been yeah and the keynotes have been awesome I'm intimidated I usually get scared before I speak but like after Sam and and Alyssa I mean this is this has been a great a great series of keynotes okay one last thanks and that's to Samantha Fletcher and Tracy Jones both of whom have teamed up Samantha has done Yeoman's work in making this the details that these are incredibly complex processes as I think any of you have done this no and Samantha's really pulled out and Tracy has been just a pillar of support behind it also thank you guys bearing witness seeking justice the conference papers as I said have been really inspiring offered an array of entry points into the power of individuals to witness to bear witness to create video testimonies bearing witness as we've seen in many cases boils down to the courage of a lone individual someone willing to stand in a tense situation pull out the camera and do something but seeking justice has a different dynamic bearing witness tends to be an individual act it's an act where our integrity is a person our the safety of our bodies is on the line but justice is tense justice as we usually talk about it is more systemic justice is a social process it's a there are institutions behind it we haven't talked a lot I mean obviously some papers have but we haven't talked a lot about how to go from bearing witness to making that act of courage mean something fine traction make a difference as so many historical cases demonstrate bearing witness by itself can be ignored suppressed marginalized sometimes it gets buy-in sometimes it gets momentum those are the cases we know but for every case we know I'm willing to bet that there are hundreds that are not seen it's an interesting study what makes a case stick what makes something be sticky or go viral I don't think we necessarily have as much agency as we think in this there are these complex configurations of power that sometimes wind up injustice and many cases wind up just with with nothing bearing witness you know we've talked a lot about the power of the phone and videography and the numbers are encouraging I mean in the United States average cell phone age is almost three years but they still have cameras and they're still pretty good they're probably high-def and penetration rate here is pretty good something like 95 percent in the rest of the world it's not forgotten but it's it's it's certainly there and I think the an assumption one of the assumptions for a lot of what we spoken about again not all is that there is a truth process here a truth-telling process I use Godard's reference here but you know as the work that Sam Gregory has been doing at witness and that we've been helping with some on with deep fakes these are the truth is not assured in the image it feels good to think that but I alas not so true anyway my aim in this talk is to step back and put this amazing work of seeking of bearing witness into the larger context of seeking justice and just try to look at what's in that landscape that both confuses the story or might help to accelerate its presence spoiler alert context can be a depressing thing because there's a lot of noise out there all of the tools we're looking at cut both ways at least both ways sometimes like they cut three or four different ways they can be the technological enablements for civil good the cell phone can be repurposed with malice or worse simply mundane technocratic control and oppression which we're seeing more and more of these same tools plus the same social formations can be put to highly divergent ends as we know with disinformation campaigns QAnon the work happening in QAnon is the forensic impulse is writ large but what the folks come up with is kind of frightening so this is a complex terrain I just want to call that out to some extent so if we think about the technology side we've celebrated rightly celebrated the use of cell phones for bearing witness but we know that the state has an incredible apparatus at its disposal armed with AI facial recognition you name it and that this is growing much more pervasive this is growing by the minute these are two very different paradigms in terms of how we witness the state as witness its own witness and we as a you know surveillance and surveillance which we've heard a lot about so they're obviously radically opposed it in other sense one is our agency and and something we have control of something the other is being done to us that space as I said is growing quite quickly there's a kind of potentially commonality here and that is in the panoptic effect in the sense that someone is always watching when you look at the cell phone penetration rates I just mentioned 95% in the US the likelihood that whatever a police officer or anyone else does there's someone nearby with the with the camera is highly likely so that in a certain sense mitigates the kind of more structural presence of surveillance cameras so all is not lost so yeah we talked about this the split between witness and justice the other side of it is how do we make sense of these bits if we want to use good darts these these bits of truth or these these bits of evidence what do we do with them and and Sam pointed out the importance of narrative for example like we need to do something with it in a way that incorporates it that encodes it that that makes it part of an argument that makes it palatable makes sense and what you're seeing at the top frame and we'll come back to this later is an image from the Guardian a two-year series they did called the counted which they basically crowdsourced evidence of of deaths at the hands of police deaths in the United States at the hands of police the FBI you might you may remember a couple years ago there was after George Floyd in fact the the question came up how many people die in encounters with police in America each year and that seemed to be a question that was unanswerable even the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not have an answer to that question and so the Guardian launched this project where people across the country could just send in reports of this happening and then the Guardian would vet it they would use their journalistic apparatus to to make sure this was you know indeed properly vetted so a really interesting example of a journalistic organization doing something that they could never do just with their reported with their reporters I mean one or two reporters would get the job of counting deaths in America so impossible task for the newspaper unless they work with the public so this is a great example to me of a kind of a collaborative methodology that that is still responsible invented on the other side we have something like the Q and on stories or the the 5g you know the rotting your brain the lizard people you name it these conspiracies that have that have taken root in in our internet culture that have that have fostered and grown there where people's forensic impulse is is unleashed in ways that are really not productive it's a it's a dog chasing its tail and it's doing so with great vigor so both of these strike me as as tapping in a way the the forensic drive that that we seem to have that forensic itch that seems to pervade the race but in radically different ways one really productive and one really unproductive they represent two very different epistemologies one kind of reality-based and one one I'm not sure what to describe it as so I want to just start with surveillance and I guess the point I want to make in the next couple of slides is simply that not not just that surveillance is an old story but that each new media form that's entered our our ecosystem our culture has almost immediately been put to use for purposes of surveillance and and it's always been a double-edged practice here you're looking at some uses of photography back in the back in the 19th century and Bertrand who gives who gives us fingerprints his project was actually quite interesting and he also he was also into ear prints and nose prints and not prints but like images of noses of lips of foreheads of physiognomy where he was convinced that he could find traits now we think of fingerprints as a unique identifier and he thought of for example the ear as a unique identifier but not so much in the sense of like oh we have an ear print because you don't get those so often but rather in the sense of a predictor of a certain proclivity a criminal proclivity a low bruh think of think of villains on cheap television shows or in comic books low brow you know certain kind of nose or jaw that kind of that kind of set of assumptions was was kind of built into what he did but it's also a part and part at this this kind of comes back with some of our facial recognition technologies and it comes back in our emotion trackers with the work of Duchenne de Bologna who did a lot of experiments the interesting images of sort of shocking mental patients faces and with that with the conceit that what what when the twitch occurred when the when the grimace would occur that these were or states these were like basic states of the of the sets of the face and in this particular example he compares he compares it to classical sculpture to show that these are really kind of conditions of the pure states of human affect readable legible from the outside and again if you think today of where our technologies are in terms of emotion trackers things that are judging whether you're happy or sad or potentially dangerous there is a direct line back to some of this work so although this happened quite you know it's although this seems ridiculous at some level it is very much present in some of the thinking around our current technologies the camera especially the coming so the camera is developed in maybe 1830s but film stock that is instantaneous is introduced more mid century 1850s 1860s and by around 1900 cheap easy to process instantaneous film was widespread and there were there was a there was a plague to use the periods language a plague of Kodakers people that used Kodak running a muck through New York streets and other streets unsure taking surreptitious photos of other people surveillance the police of course also used it for surveillance so that double-edged photography is already embedded in practices and pretty widespread a pretty voluminous amount of prose and newspapers are complaining about this practice and you're seeing some sort of candid a candid cane a camera cane and some of the kind of shots that might come from it this around 1900 already so this doubleness is already in place and this notion of surveilling seeing the world unseen filmmakers like Veratov will make a big deal about seeing the unseen and cap capturing reality unawares celebrating that and rightly so but it does have a difficult history television has a pre cinematic history going back to maybe the 1870s 1880s and not as a object not as a working technological fact but rather as a anticipated set of desires and these are this is from Albert Robida in this case 1890 and one of the striking things in Robida is in his fulsome description of this technology called the telephono scope he he really outlines a series of vignettes of scenarios where how this thing is going to be used and it's going to be used for news and it's going to be used for entertainment and it's and he has a whole bunch on how it's going to be used for voyeurism and surveillance in this case voyeurism so again this is hard wired into the imagination of a technology before it even gets off the ground this this sense the dystopian side of it of course is robustly represented in in future films the surveillance side of it with with Chaplin in this case and so gear shift so it feels like I jumped a slide but maybe I didn't so anyway this is to jump then to a section on this sort of forensic this this impulse that we have and I'm not sure if any of you are followers not followers but like read on observe observers of QAnon but it's a really fascinating space a deeply fascinating space people invest hundreds of hours in terms of the kind of forensic work that went into tracking I mean there's like thousands of pictures of Hillary Clinton's open mouth trying to prove that she is a lizard and there are some 13 million people allegedly not even allegedly I mean this is New York Times is my source maybe I should have to say alleged there that that that are believers in the kind of lizard takeover so a little bit worrying but it is exactly the same impulse that we use when we're trying to analyze like what happened with this with this death what happened with this riot and let's look at the footage and figure it out it's that same impulse just directed in a ridiculous way and frightening all the more because of its endorsement from the highest levels of authoritarian political party in our country somehow I screwed up my slides this was just a reminder that this this observation this surveillance and surveillance I'm kind of it's kind of value free at some level there is great stuff a lot of our cultural history of our cultural memory comes from this it's not a necessarily evil thing or a great thing but it's it's a thing nevertheless but and this is just a reminder to say that the technologies we're talking about here in the case of the camera are not race neutral technologies have biases and the biases in photography are really striking and you know striking in the sense that we can talk about black and white photography and color photography the problem in color photography is finally sorted somewhere in the 1970s I think it's Kodak gold that that is brought to the market it's it's reasonable with black skin black skin looks tones of brown or black or are visible they're not green or just invisible but Kodak markets that in the 70s as being you know this is a film stock a color film stock that's great for dark woods chocolate and and brown horses it's like what of course you know of course you know what this is about and not said not spoken in the ads up until that point and you can see that by by the Shirley girl up there this was a Kodak colors color stock reference the Shirley girl is always white and almost always described as normal so this kind of okay so you think okay it's the 50s that's the 60s maybe even the 70s like forgive them their sins but when Instagram comes into the world it's not different if you look at the beautifying filters and Instagram their bias is to lighten up if you look at Julie Balouini's work here at MIT and now I should know where she is now and I don't but with the algorithmic Justice League it's remarkable work that shows the inherent the built-in bias in these facial recognition systems in the AI systems that we're using here so all to say you know we can talk about the camera and what it does but in fact we also have to think critically about these technologies particularly when it comes to to racial issues the the shackling of image of images to image recognition systems to facial recognition systems is a really frightening step one that in China has gotten quite good because now you can do it with masks and it still works I mean that's that's not a lot of data to be to be making identity claims on I'm not sure what happened to these glasses this is an image from around 2013 and they kind of stopped appearing online so I'm not sure it either went like covert or doesn't really work but these are these are little facial recognition glasses so that the police on the street can know who's who and what's what it's it seems unlikely I'm not maybe this was just a big PR blitz they did at that time but there is really interesting information coming out of the Times that's looking at the supply chain and trying to figure out trying to assess what's the state of the game in terms of this kind of sewer violence and in our own country it's starting to get a little frightening this with a you know a moderately I don't want to say progressive but a moderately a left of center mayor and this linkage of what's on your ring phone and ring ring camera and what's in your shop linking that in real time with police cameras is you know it's it's civil liberties union and others are really quite concerned about this and rightly so so just to say I'm not China bashing we're just we're trying to catch up we're doing our best it's just one other side to this that's kind of curious later in the presentation we'll see an image from a Belgian artist to be his supporter who takes Instagram photos and connects them to the live earth cam footage of that person posing for the footage so that maybe you saw this in the Times but that really super looking photo and then you see someone working for like two hours to just get the right photo so he did this he posted it you know he's an artist he did does great stuff and he put it online and it got pulled from YouTube because earth cam claims they have surveillance cameras all over the place and they claim copyright they claim so when you walk by you are part of the copyrighted world of earth cam so there's there's the issue of of governmental surveillance and governmental the potentials for oppression but there's also kind of a marketing part of this that's a little frightening that your data is now part of a data set like it or not why in documentary you've always got to get people to sign releases here no they just own it and so and it's a reminder that you know Jeremy Bentham's panopticon that Michelle Foucault wrote so much about and this idea that a few guards in the center turret can control the whole prison by observation that notion is the one you see embedded in the in the little glass bubbles and on the ceilings of stores but it's it's really become pervasive in our culture as I said earlier because all of us have the cameras and okay the forensic urge so what is this urge where does it come from what are its cultural specificities I have Barnum up here and Neil Harris's book humbug Neil Harris has a wonderful thesis on this idea of humbug so humbug is just like it's kind of nonsense that's you know fakeness in a way and he has a book on the role the place of humbug in 19th century early 20th century America it basically makes the argument that this is an incredibly important cultural characteristic of the United States and he goes to anecdote after anecdote Barnum is his primary case where people love the debate the more absurd the claim the more passionate the debate it's never about are you right or ultimately right proven right or wrong that's inconsequential and I think so much Trump understood this instinctively it's the debate say something outrageous and let the debate follow and people there's there's a kind of it happens in quotes in air quotes people aren't really in get you know invested in these positions but they act as if and it's a it's a very curious phenomenon it's something quite I mean I live a lot in Europe and here it's something I don't you know it's traces in Europe but here it is indeed and Trump is a manifestation of a really a really profound thing and I I want to bring that up because it's an interesting frame to think about the forensic urge in its Americanism there is a way here you know QAnon is like that's their copycats in Europe but this is the place where it's a passion the lizard people I'm sure you could probably find a few believers in Europe but here 13 million and I think it comes it's all with that kind of tongue-in-cheek almost true what if the kind of speculative engagement with the world but one that its main affordance is that you can dive deep do your forensic things scratch that scratch that forensic itch find evidence here there and everywhere put it together and that's what's so striking about the discourse online that it's the evidentiary approach to it it's that people are finding things comparing them so all to say that the wisdom of the crowd is not necessarily a great thing I mean I've just written a book that Jen mentioned collective wisdom and it's very much about trying to co-create and work with people but there's there can't be a toxicity and we know that we know that from the witch trials and we know it from the Kennedy the Kennedy assassination theorists and we know it from the 9-11 folks you know this is a CIA plot or whatever what is that and how can we channel that how can we take that impulse and drive it in a way that's productive as opposed to just kind of going off the deep end I use a you know again I refer to the deep fake work people are indeed spending a lot of money trying to like refine that technology and there's a lot of clunky stuff out there but at some level it almost doesn't matter it almost doesn't matter and I think the Earl Morris's statement of it in this in the title of his book believing is seeing that believing pre believing determines what you see and which goes way back to the pre-socratics this is a pretty powerful notion that we don't see the world we believe something and we find it in the world there is there are there are people for whom that is emphatically the case and so it for me it's a kind of de-centers the whole issue of deep fake which is which is of course can be used to bolster an argument but for a lot of people it just doesn't matter no matter how fake no matter how absurd how how crude the fake that's not the issue it's already they've already been sold on it and this is a really good example to me Barbie's book is looks at the for example there's a pruder film as you know I'm the film historian from from house out then this is probably probably the three minutes of the most analyzed more people have analyzed this footage and seen more different things in it than just about anything the closer you look the more strange things you find it's like how does that work and she document she documents this and it really is a great example of different belief systems coming to bear on a piece of evidence and in fact the evidence ultimately supporting all of it or not supporting any of it but it's about a kind of epistemological break and that break which was kind of there already when you know in the 60s that Heather talked about kind of being a little more pronounced at the end of the 60s is in full full flame right now social media have obviously given if we think back when Kennedy was around I mean we're talking a bit like in the late 60s with Heather's talk a world with very limited outlets with more more just you know filtering is an issue choice is an issue three main broadcasters but what's fundamentally an issue is temporality yes there's live TV but precious little yes there's live TV but easy to circumvent as Heather showed us with these media forums temporality is everything as is the spread so the spread the breaking down of filters but also the fact that instantaneity is possible is really one of the one of the things that's really changed the condition so that the kind of accumulated inherited wisdom we have in media studies it's kind of coming from photography through film to television breaks at this point because the I think the temporal the shift in temporal conditions is simply profound so and if you if you haven't seen this book and you're up for like a good page turner read it's it's it's a fun book and it's a scary book it's written I want to say in 2014 and I I'd only read it like last week but I can't imagine being surprised by the Ukrainian situation if I'd read this book earlier and it's it's it's by a documentary producer Russian born British bread goes back to Russia after the after the fall after the end of the Soviet Union is a hot shot because he's really he's perceived as English and basically kind of walks us through a number of his investigative stories and the ecosystem and the structure the hard wiring of disinformation in that world which is very much part of our world here and more and more of it social media really really facilitates this to some extent it's quite a useful it's quite a useful read but anyway just to say given that epistemological uncertainty that I referred to earlier given that that forensic drive this on top of it just kind of leads to a trifecta of confusion a trifecta of confusion there it is okay okay so gloom and doom sorry let's switch to like how can what the hell can we do how can we I'm gonna be very pragmatic here Sam gave us a lot of like forward-looking you know like let's think about getting in there at the standards level as new technologies are emerging and making sure this won't come back to bite us I'm gonna be like really next couple of years next five years and look but I think there's some great examples I will tell you right at the outset again Sam I'm gonna abuse your name up here there is a there is a issue of equity here there is it this is something the first world can do in a way that a lot of other parts of the world can't and we have to find ways to fix that and we have to find ways to even make what I'm showing you now more more vigorous but let's get going you know how to go from witnessing to justice that's that that's the key question I just want to start with this this point back to the 1930s this wonderful project a couple of former Cambridge University students got together and started this this amazing project to document everyday life in Britain and they got a couple hundred people involved to keep diaries and what's interesting about this project is that it was a bottom-up project there was not government funding this was like hey cool idea let's look around world is changing fast let's figure it out led to a number of policy changes ranging from the kinds of posters that the the the British were using to you know in the warm-up to World War two to the to tax policy which started to change as a result of better understanding better insights into the lives of the ordinary people so this was a really inspiring project it kind of comes and goes it still exists in a way but just to say that this kind of surveillance meets surveillance can happen if there's structure if there's a framework one historical precedent the arts are another great police this is the Dries de Porter piece that I mentioned where you see the Instagram shot and the posing I was wondering what that was I've seen these people on the streets kind of dancing around and now I think I better understand it the arts a great way to interrogate this space and I'm not going to go into the arts I'm going to go into really pragmatic ways to use this footage to take this testimony and to do something with it so it's going to really boil down to a couple of things like NGOs and Sam Sam's talk was a real inspiration in that regard witness does great work and it's 30 years of great work and it's it's great work in terms of like on the on the ground like documentation as well as thinking ahead and figuring out what's coming down down the pike it's something that the folks in Amsterdam and with Bellingcat do in a really wonderful way I was surprised to find the National Post lottery is one of their funding sources God bless the Dutch they do remarkable investigative stories again using you know using open source material using open source intelligence really working with any material they can find in highly creative ways to sort of document what seems to be undocumented before sometimes the mainstream press and certainly for some governments so NGOs are some NGOs are proving to be a place of real important activity in terms of being an interface between stuff that's on the streets and things that turn into reports or finally get into the courts or you know finally make it to the press the press is another really terrific place alas these examples in the press are rare so the Guardian newspaper I love but these kinds of collaborative examples this is a little bit more information on the counted are our last few and far between but here what they basically did for a two-year period was was sort of document these deaths and you could get a you could get a little if you click on one of these images you'll get this little blow-up with the story the documentation there was an interface where you can slice it and dice it by the age of the victim whether they had a weapon or not how they died was a surprising number of people died by tasers like something like 20 percent 25 percent was really quite surprised by that by state by race by by whatever so this is a very interesting tool but it's also kind of a narrative it's a narrative that you can you can construct your own narrative by working with this data and a really a really noble initiative and a sign that this kind of collaboration between us and them between us we in the streets and the folks that that work in the newspapers it can happen it's a great example of it alas as I said there aren't a lot the Times obviously and you know other newspapers have been doing good work lately again using videos using citizen produced video and then and then analyzing really really working with that and working with in this case it's a lot of found material from the internet some of the analysis working with that and then bringing it to a bigger public so there's some this is a thing they've I think the Times is doing a bit more regularly but it seems to me this is a space we really need to think more about how can we come up with more robust forms of collaborative journalism working with the kind of credentialed respectable responsible press but in a way that takes that makes use that does things the press can't do alone and and does it in a way that verifies the work we're doing on the ground takes testimony turns it into justice even as we speak there's a our Dean Melissa our former Dean and now and now Chancellor Melissa Nobles with her her good buddy Margaret Burnham Margaret has a new book out this is a long-term project over at Northeastern where year after year law students were sent went to I think over the Christmas breaks or whatever they went south and they would try to find cold cases cases from the 20s 30s 40s year after year and a database started to accrete of mostly black men who died in mysterious ways disappeared there was one street car that I remember to hear that one street car line that I don't know like seven or eight men never made it got on and never made it off and you only start to see these patterns when you can go through huge data sets so by throwing this army of lost you know lawyers in training loose on these data sets they were able a to find a lot of them I mean patterns that are pretty shocking be to learn methodologically that you never try to work with the local courts or the local police like that leads to parking tickets arrests you know no information but if you try you know and she's outlined she and her students have outlined the ways that do work so all to say it's it's turned into this book they also have a database behind it that's what's on the other side and it's being presented right now the book launch but this is a really really important project and again a sign of what okay we've talked about NGOs we've talked about the press in this case what universities can do universities can do powerful things because a they're training the future but be that process of training can also be a data aggregator and a data analyzer a way to turn witness into justice this is Goldsmith's forensic architecture is an amazing if you don't know these people you should they do incredible work really incredible work and transformative work and it always shocks me that this is a lab at a university so again they're working with all kinds of data sets creatively they're working they're definitely going against the wind against the against the waves they're going against a lot of vested interests to come up with the stories they do they're reporting on Israel has really been quite good among many other stories so just to say this is if you don't know them keep an eye out for them but it's a university and finally I'll point to the project we did where it's you know it's just about to come out it'll be out starting November but the the idea of co-creation is to try to build trust and to try to try to harness the power of people by working with them not trying to do things for them not doing things about them but working with them and in so doing trying to build relationships trying to build trust trying to establish credibility and so we've been this is based on a lot of fieldwork on tons of interviews but you know we have sites fieldwork sites like in Kentucky we have a couple of different sites in rural Kentucky where we're trying to work with unemployed coal miners or folks in the in the rural outback to figure out how these communities can can you know what are their needs and why did their newspapers disappear what what are their new sources what do they want how can how can how can we imagine together ways how can we leverage our brand and are the stuff that we as MIT can can help in a situation with what they want and how can we make that happen together so there've been a bunch of different endeavors here to to try again to leverage the power of individuals from witnessing to doing something bigger systemically on the level of trying to achieve justice so yeah the there's a tension I think that just to summarize you know between the kind of applications of the technology on the one hand and the kind of investigative drive and also narrative frames that we're giving to it and and to me these are the key questions you know how do we how do we how do we imbue our media practices with ethics ethics it's a it's a funny ethics is a philosophy department started to fade in our universities ethics were kind of the first thing to go they get trotted out as as ornaments as Google has shown us so so sadly but I think we have to think of media practice and ethics in the same in the same breath it is it's inherent and maybe it's like to even stupid to say it here when you're talking about witnessing ethics are kind of part of the job but anyway that's that's you know how do we how do we direct this energy in a way that's productive and not just psychotic psychotic means broken from the world it means deluded and and again we have we inhabit this moment of a kind of epistemological rupture it really doesn't matter what you say sometimes because it just won't be heard and we have to find a way to suture that so that's why I'm focusing on these kind of mainstream organizations again admittedly this is all kind of it's very tangible concrete but everyone everyone you know I'm sure witness can use more money and and more boots on the ground and I for sure the newspapers can use a lot more creative thinking in terms of working with communities not just talking about communities or selling newspapers to communities and universities need to do a much better job of not just you know of getting out of the tower and trying to interface with the world partner with our communities and make a difference so that's I think it thank you we have time for a couple of questions if anybody you've got any energy left after all this two days of two intense days hi thank you very much for the talk so we are talking about these collaborations between like Press University other institutions NGOs and the communities this is at the time that in the US and in some parts of Europe that trust in almost all of these institutions that all-time low right and we see that a lot of times people get to those spaces like QAnon when they see one lie by political institutions and then that's lie leads them for example to a YouTube video that they see it and then they just go down that rabbit hole of algorithm suggesting them that's like oh you're interested in these lies let me show you more and then they suddenly become even like flat earth it's so easy to go down that rabbit hole so and then like in academia we have the problem of class right that there are reports that increasingly the faculty of humanities are coming from upper middle class upper class and their interests and their concerns don't necessarily align with working class lower middle class so I'm wondering that there's a lot of work that and then of course the issue of press that is owned by corporations the vast majority of them so what can all of the what how can we even re-imagine first the institutions from universities to press and all these political institutions and the algorithms on platforms so that we gain that trust they gain so that we can work together yeah thank you thank you for that so I think it's about what I've shown here are hints because the Guardian doesn't do this very often they've done it as far as I know once you know for a two-year period sustained and important they've done some other interesting projects but but basically they don't do a lot there are not outlets for people to sort of put their forensic imagination their forensic impulse to work there aren't outlets the right actually provides a fair amount of like you get a lot of feedback from your peers and you and off you go what are we what are the sort of normal people the normies doing you know we don't really have those opportunities so much so when I look at just that the couple of these couple of examples like I think they need to be much more visible there have their need to be outlets built rebuilding community is central to all of this I think it's that's fallen away a little bit and not going to point at social media but it's one of one of the factors in there exacerbated by things like COVID whatever most recently but in the making for a while so so I think you know like a very different I mean pie in the sky very different notion of how we arrange our politics so that the local matters a lot more and it's not just this kind of crazy national media game when in fact the realities are all local Republican seem to understand this so for example a lot of the focus on school boards in this country has been a really I think quite interesting and effective tactic to sort of to galvanize people's energy to galvanize their desire to have some kind of community interaction and dig in and fight for a cause okay in a reprehensible way but what's the other side doing and it's nothing so I think part of the problem is avoid in terms of a place for people to put to work what they're worried about what their concerns are that's not a good answer and and it's a car and obviously step out of this cultural frame and it gets complicated in all kind of other ways a great answer but sure so going off of of the last question and I'm thinking about what institutes like MIT can do to partner with schools we were just in there with the high school students to have them thinking about collaboration in a way that it feeds into this pipeline when we're thinking about ethics like you said that's not something that's being learned in the classroom now but how do we bridge that gap and what are your thoughts on that yeah so so thank you and I think there are incredible opportunities for example neighborhood no one knows neighborhoods better than the folks who live there and we live in a media era there's a lot of new tech out there that that the people want to learn about how can we you know one way is to sort of have have local I work with high schools to have training about let's just pick something arbitrarily augmented reality okay hip cool whatever if I think of summerville where I live here every intersection has a name on it like the sergeant McKinley square like who the hell is sergeant McKinley and there's a there's probably someone maybe someone interesting or not but that's a story that's a researchable story but more even more interesting is how did sergeant McKinley's name get to be there whose name isn't there what's the pattern of names those are those are very easy to research things and very easy to geolocate data so you're teaching kids the technology you're teaching them the research skills to to kind of figure out how this happened in city hall who decided this name and not that name what was that process and you're giving them kind of look at how the power works and like what do we need to do to fix it really hyper local really but but you know fun I mean I haven't worked with young kids that much but I get the sense like the kind of stuff I talk about in the classroom is probably not going to be interesting but this hands-on stuff might be a little more so that kind of I think take advantage of the place where you are and so much of I mean not so much but there are there are really a number of elements of what happens at MIT that are completely relevant for the neighborhoods and where we can where we can learn from the community MIT is better than a lot of institutions I would say at least the ones I've worked at but if there's a lot more we can do other questions certainly conferences like this make a difference because conferences like this don't just bring academics together they bring a lot of different people from different walks of life including different ages so if we have a direction to pursue it's to strengthen the offerings of these kinds of of groups meeting like this and you know talking about some of these issues and publicizing them other questions thank you for your talk amazing as always I have a question about okay so what do you think about using surveillance right ignite people but then how so very like you know like how the community then start to feel like paranoid and you know like creating I guess like I will tell you in the case of the delivery workers right in the case of the delivery workers they work that I'm using yeah so they're you know like reporting when they see someone that potentially could be a thief right but then and that start because they had a problem right and they start building community but this I'm starting to see that it's becoming a problem because now they are seeing you know a target in different people and they are like targeting people that might not be you know like thieves so I'm just wondering like yeah it is important so it's valiant and also like in igniting you know like the community but then it has like a backwards right or like a like another problem that I'm starting to see with this community and I was just wondering if you have any like have you thought about it or yeah yeah so I guess I've thought about it in the sense that these are always double edged at least double edged technologies and applications and I think I kind of want to part of me the hopeful part of me wants to say we're in this transition period we know that we have we know that the surveillance the state you know the kind of number of cameras are rapidly increasing that that side is there we know that for me the surveillance side is an interesting counter force a counter balance and I wonder part of me wonders like so what was the public before any of this I see you you see me I see everyone around me everyone around me sees me like there was we had kind of equal access to one another the game is a little upside now especially with facial recognition technologies and all that stuff that we're never really going to get the same way the state gets but I wonder if we're not just in a kind of hopefully we're in a kind of transition that when we when we all are armed with these things we all have the ability to watch each other like maybe we'll it'll either we'll get accustomed to it and get over it or kind of figure out that like we're as vulnerable as we are offensive so let's just be cool again not a great answer I I'm just hopeful that it's a transition a cultural transition moment but um but you know it's inherent it's inherent and it's been inherent in these technologies from the get-go and as I showed with photography around 1900 that double edgedness is there and um William this this has been an incredible conference in terms of the range of discussion it's been I wish I'd brought all of witnesses 45 colleagues here a lot of them have been live streaming in so just really appreciate it I want to ask a question that is around the link between the kind of forensic impulse and media literacy because I think the two get and I'm thinking about Dana Boyd talking about media literacy as this rabbit hole where you kind of clamber down of trying to unpick everything and you end up unpicking it to the extent that it you you can't make sense of it so I'm and often in the work of witness we hear people talking about you know doing the type of stuff that a Bellingcat does or a reverse image search as part of media literacy and it's sort of like plugging in these technologies plugging in this forensic impulse into an idea of how citizens should use their literacies and it so I guess the question is really just like what is the relationship you see between more broad-based consumer media literacies and this forensic turn and how do we manage that without it becoming this kind of impulse to deconstruct the media until it means nothing now great question and it echoes uh it goes briefly back to Jim's opening comment about just how how important the media are in our lives and how little we attend critically to them institutionally so at a place like this we a lot goes into like making the chips and figuring out the latest you know the liquid lens and you name it but not a lot into the kind of critical assessment I mean I think our program is probably it and it's not a big program and it's not a well-funded program and it seems to be fun it's fundamental and it's certainly fundamental on on on so I'm a huge advocate of media literacy and I think I think it's a really potentially useful way to kind of to kind of put into context the kind of uses and abuses of the of the forensic impulse in this regard because you can make this you can call this stuff out to be as ridiculous as it is if you really just take two steps back if you're self-taught and if this is your entree into the world of media literacy your friends have showed you how to do the blow-up and you figured out how to freeze the frame and like that's that's learning and it's progress and I understand the attraction of that and and you're going down the algorithmic the algorithmic the hold that the algorithm has done for you that's incredibly precarious so yes some way of standardizing and teaching like bringing bringing media literacy literacy to much higher levels is is fundamental and and I just it's absence from the curricula whether whether basic school high school university it's its absence is in this era with the speed of transformation of our media forms just strikes me as irresponsible not only irresponsible but like willful like it is it is willfully absent when we've pressed up we pressed on it hard here for the maybe first 10 years of this program so let's say from 2000 to 2010 really worked hard to get it in the schools MacArthur Foundation a lot of money to back it like millions to to do it and the basic the resistance was so mundane it was kind of shocking well there aren't enough hours in the day with the curriculum or states testing standards like preclude any new curricular material it was that kind of very mundane blockage but it persists and it's stunning and it's precarious we look at the you look at the political situation in this nation and not just this nation it's it's endangering our futures to be ignorant about this or to be self-taught in a kind of half-assed way that that has certain affordances and certain set brings that certain satisfactions but also is really dangerous so yeah thanks thanks for bringing that up thank you thanks very much this what a brilliant conference i think one more word is going to be said but but thank you all it's really yeah it's been a pleasure just introduce Eric clopper Eric clopper professor in the comparative media studies in writing head of our department and maybe even head of i think head of literature as well this guy wears has two heads so be careful i will be brief thank you william that was wonderful um i'll be brief as i know i like all of you um drank from the fire hose as we say here at MIT for the last couple days i mean i think this was both a sort of intellectual um fire hose but it was also an emotional fire hose as well and so i feel i feel that i feel that in my head um uh and through that through that process i've i've learned something i've learned a lot of things actually and i've changed in the last couple days and as i think about bearing witness my definitions of that have changed somewhat i think about it as a more active process a more dynamic global process and one even more under threat than i thought before but i reflected actually on the on the title of the event and particularly i proposed to the to the last question here um you know the the the subtitle of the event is videography in the hands of the people but i also think about this and learned about this as video in the hands of the people um it's about what happens to that video also when it gets out into the world and becomes viewed by people um and while the videographer is paramount to this to this uh to this effort um so are all the viewers um who do something with that with that video when it gets in their hands and then i think that responsibility is increasing um for the viewers um as um authoritarianism racism other forms of social injustice um remain or be or increase in their pervasiveness um and technology while provides um an avenue to bearing witness it also provides additional challenges to bearing witness i mean so i think about the kinds of responsibilities that we as an institution here at MIT have um for helping with that um and it's about it's about education it's about having events like this it's about it's about the collaboration that that that also was just previously talked about as well um and so i certainly think about more doing up as a department as an institution about doing more events like this about making more of an impact in this area and extending the mission of our of our unit as well so with that um i will i'll have a number of thanks to give here um i'd like to thank philip alexander i'm our provost cindy barnhart um maricio cordero i'm richard duffy fox harrell robin palazzo uh ardeen augustin rio who you heard at the beginning and andrew wittaker um i do want to also call out the the entire conference committee here many of whom are still in the room with us right now michelle de graff um john de fava rene green uh tracy jones nicole harris heather hendershot caesar mcdowell uh ken manning chacanesta movunga jame jim parody justin rike andrew turco uh william murkyo and suwafa zudanin and like to especially call out um tracy i she's still here somewhere tracy right there tracy jones um seman the fletcher who is also here in the back it's man of the fletcher who really it's where it's sort of some of the muscle behind these events and and i will add my special thanks to ken manning um as as as william as as william as william mentioned um you would think that in an event in a place like mit that this kind of event would be easy to put on it's a necessary event it's the right place for an event like this and yet it is not an easy effort to get an event like this produced and and funded and and and underway um and ken was tireless in making this happen um and he really deserves a tremendous amount of credit for that and i see i see um a satisfaction in his eye as as he was as he was at the conference and it's not in himself and his in his accomplishments because that's not who he is it was about the accomplishments and the success of everybody who came on these stages and spoke and spoke the truth and made a difference and for that for bringing all those people together i give ken a great deal of gratitude so thank you