“Stay with me”

A live-streamed murder and the urgency of media witnessing

Authors

  • Marlon Santa Maria Dias Unochapecó

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29146/eco-ps.v27i1.28086

Keywords:

media witnessing, testimonial image, live streaming, racism, police violence

Abstract

This essay discusses media witnessing in contemporary times, focusing on how this type of testimony reveals forms of production and recognition of suffering in digital networks. To do so, it starts with the analysis of an exemplary case: a Facebook live streaming of a black man murder by the police, which occurred in the United States in 2016. The text explores three aspects: 1) the context of the production of social suffering, relating it to the racism that supports and permeates police violence; 2) the reference to other images whose existence is linked to the analyzed live streaming; 3) the ethical and aesthetical singularities of the testimonial image. The essay concludes that there is an expansion of the notion of witness through a narrative and audiovisual form of recording suffering.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

AGAMBEN, Giorgio. O que resta de Auschwitz. São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2008.

ALMEIDA, Silvio. O que é racismo estrutural? Belo Horizonte: Letramento, 2018.

ANDÉN-PAPADOPOULOS, Kari. Media witnessing and the “crowd-sourced video revolution”. Visual Communication, v. 12, n. 4, p. 341-357, 2013.

ANJOS, Moacir dos. A fúria contra o estranho. Zum, 10 ago. 2016. Disponível em: https://bit.ly/3iRblQB. Acesso em: 3 abr. 2023.

BROWNE, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

BRUNO, Fernanda. Máquinas de ver, modos de ser: vigilância, tecnologia e subjetividade. Porto Alegre: Sulina, 2013.

BUTLER, Judith. Endangered/endangering: Schematic racism and white paranoia. In: GOODING-WILLIAMS, Robert (ed.). Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising. New York: Routledge, 1993. p. 15-22.

DIAS, Marlon Santa Maria. O desassossego das imagens: políticas do sofrimento em redes digitais. 2022. Tese (Doutorado em Ciências da Comunicação) – Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, São Leopoldo, 2022.

DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. Imagens apesar de tudo. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2020.

FELMAN, Shoshana; LAUB, Dori. Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York; London: Routledge, 1992.

FROSH, Paul; PINCHEVSKI, Amit. Introduction: why media witnessing? Why now? In: Media witnessing: testimony in the age of mass communication. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. p. 1-22.

GREGORY, Sam. Human rights in an age of distant witnesses: remixed lives, reincarnated images and live-streamed co-presence. In: EDER, J.; KLONK, C. (ed.). Image Operations: Visual Media and Political Conflict. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. p. 184-196.

HOBBS, Allyson. The Power of Looking, from Emmett Till to Philando Castile. The New Yorker, 5 ago. 2016. Disponível em: https://bit.ly/30A9fNP. Acesso em: 3 abr. 2023.

KLEINMAN, Arthur; DAS, Veena; LOCK, Margaret. Introduction. In: KLEINMAN, Arthur; DAS, Veena; LOCK, Margaret (ed.). Social Suffering. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1997. p. ix-xxvii.

MANNIX, Andy. Police audio: Officer stopped Philando Castile on robbery suspicion. Star Tribune, Minneapolis, 12 jul. 2016. Disponível em: http://strib.mn/3eAdNHT. Acesso em: 3 abr. 2023.

MARTINI, Michele. Online distant witnessing and live-streaming activism: Emerging differences in the activation of networked publics. New Media & Society, v. 20, n. 11, p. 4035-4055, 2018.

MORTENSEN, Mette. Connective witnessing: Reconfiguring the relationship between the individual and the collective. Information, Communication & Society, v. 18, n. 11, p. 1393-1406, 2015.

NICHOLSON, Judith A.; SHELLER, Mimi. Race and the politics of mobility: Introduction. Transfers, v. 6, n. 1, p. 4-11, 2016.

PAPAILIAS, Penelope. Witnessing to survive: selfie videos, live mobile witnessing and black necropolitics. In: SCHANKWEILER, K.; STRAUB, V.; WENDL, T. (ed.). Image testimonies. Witnessing in times of social media. London; New York: Routledge, 2019. p. 104-120.

PEARCE, Matt; HENNESSY-FISKE, Molly; EVANS, Erica. As police shootings continue, bystanders get more sophisticated at filming altercations. Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, 7 jul. 2016. Disponível em: https://lat.ms/3hzUNeC. Acesso em: 3 abr. 2023.

PERALTA, Eyder; CORLEY, Cheryl. The driving life and death of Philando Castile. NPR, 15 jun. 2016. Disponível em:https://n.pr/2VDJM36. Acesso em: 18 fev. 2020.

PETERS, John Durham. Witnessing. Media, Culture & Society, v. 23, n. 6, p. 707-723, 2001. Disponível em: https://bit.ly/2V85BHP. Acesso em: 12 jun. 2020.

POLYDORO, Felipe. Vídeos amadores de acontecimentos: realismo, evidência e política na cultura visual contemporânea. 2016. Tese (Doutorado em Meios e Processos Audiovisuais) – Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2016.

QUÉRÉ, Louis. Entre facto e sentido: a dualidade do acontecimento. Trajectos, Lisboa, n. 6, p. 59-75, 2005.

QUÉRÉ, Louis. A dupla vida do acontecimento: por um realismo pragmatista. In: FRANÇA, Vera Regina Veiga França; OLIVEIRA, Luciana (org.). Acontecimento: reverberações. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2012. p. 21-38.

RICHARDSON, Allissa V. Bearing Witness While Black. Theorizing African American mobile journalism after Ferguson. Digital Journalism, v. 5, n. 6, p. 673-698, 2017.

SCHANKWEILER, Kerstin. “Moroccan Lives Matter”: practices and politics of affecting. In: SCHANKWEILER, K.; STRAUB, V.; WENDL, T. (ed.). Image testimonies. Witnessing in times of social media. London; New York: Routledge, 2019. p. 59-71.

SEILER, Cotten. Mobilizing Race, Racializing Mobility: Writing Race into Mobility Studies. In: MOM, G.; PIRIE, G.; TISSOT, L. (ed.) Mobility in History: The State of the Art in the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. Switzerland: Éditions Alphil-Presses Universitaires Suisses, 2009. p. 229-233.

SELIGMANN-SILVA, Márcio. História, memória, literatura: o testemunho na era das catástrofes. Campinas: Editora Unicamp, 2003.

SELIGMANN-SILVA, Márcio. Narrar o trauma: a questão dos testemunhos de catástrofes históricas. Revista de Psicologia Clínica, Rio de Janeiro, v. 20, n. 1, p. 65-82, 2008. Disponível em: https://bit.ly/2CzZRk1. Acesso em: 12 jun. 2020.

SIMONS, Sascha. Credibility in crisis. Contradictions of web video witnessing. In: SCHANKWEILER, K.; STRAUB, V.; WENDL, T. (ed.). Image testimonies. Witnessing in times of social media. London; New York: Routledge, 2019. p. 17-29.

TILLERY, Alvin B. What Kind of Movement is Black Lives Matter? The View from Twitter. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, v. 4, n. 2, p. 297-323, 2019. Disponível em: https://bit.ly/33AooRn. Acesso em: 14 maio 2020.

ZELIZER, Barbie. About to die. How News Images Move the Public. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Published

2024-06-09

How to Cite

Santa Maria Dias, M. (2024). “Stay with me”: A live-streamed murder and the urgency of media witnessing. Revista Eco-Pós, 27(1), 185–209. https://doi.org/10.29146/eco-ps.v27i1.28086