Google, YouTube, Tasers, and News · Monday November 20, 2006
Ritchey emailed me a couple days ago about this tasering incident that happened at UCLA:
how about the way the internet (YouTube! etc!) publicizes shit that could otherwise be squashed—I mean, I know that’s the whole point of what you’re talking about, but specifically I was thinking about you today when I first heard about this tasering of a UCLA student—it was captured on all sorts of camera phones and then put all over the internet, and within seconds it is all over the world. Wouldn’t/couldn’t have happened with older forms of media—even if they DID want to publish about it.
This is indeed an interesting case study, and I think I’ll definitely be able to make use of it in my study of Google and information access, control, and dissemination on the web.
The video originally appeared on the UCLA Bruin website, but it’s received heavy rotation on YouTube during the past few days.
Here’s the original, full-length video of the tasering:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g7zlJx9u2E&eurl
This video is hosted on YouTube, which is a company owned by Google. The clip has been watched 376,402 times (another identical clip of the same event has been viewed 504,853 times), which may not be much by CNN’s standards, for example, but I certainly think it qualifies as mass media in this case, because it’s reaching hundreds of thousands of people and will potentially reach hundreds of thousands more.
The content of the video, while poorly filmed, would not be broadcast on a mainstream news station without censorship, and news clips that have used the video have had to “bleep out” swear words and edit the clip down into sections of just a few seconds. Here’s a newscast which contains clips of the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emEK7t2m35Q&NR
It’s important to note a few things with regard to this tasering video in the context of YouTube:
1) There’s no broadcaster or presenter “putting the clip into context.” There are comments which respond to the video, but they exist below the video as feedback from users and viewers. I do think that this lets the imagery speak for itself, rather than being placed in an arbitrary context based on the whims of editors and the technical restraints of television programs. It also gives the viewer a chance to immediately respond to what they’ve seen, for better or for worse. Some comments are more thoughtful than others. It would be useful to see a search/tagging mechanism for the comments on each video, as there are 3000 comments and it’s impossible to read through them all.
2) Google/YouTube aren’t censoring the video so far, as all of the swears and screams are left intact, as opposed to in the television broadcast, where the clip is spliced and edited to fit the form of television news. How often does one see a 7 minute clip broadcast without editing? Not often, if ever.
3) The bandwidth costs for streaming such a large amount of video would be prohibitive for most websites. For instance, if I put such a video up on my personal website and 800,000 people viewed it, it would a) probably crash the site and b) hit me with an expensive bandwidth bill for using so much data on my server. Google/YouTube, backed by lots of advertising and massive server infrastructure, is able to absorb these costs into their cost of operating. Thus, in this case, advertising appears to support the cause of democracy, or at least the technical aspect of hosting and serving and allowing access to the full length, unedited video.
I actually don’t see any ads on the page because I have a browser plugin that hides most internet ads, but I would definitely be willing to view a banner or text ad on the page in order to see the video. I’m not sure where this fits into my research yet, but it is indeed interesting to see how a student with a mobile phone/digital camera, Google (YouTube) and advertising can provide such widespread access to a potentially politically important video.
We’ll have to see how this plays out at UCLA and what happens with these officers to see if it affects any change on a practical level.
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