WRITTEN ON March 28th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized

Sousveillance is about to go global. Peter Gabriel is here in Oxford telling a sparsely peopled Nelson Mandela lecture theatre about his “Witness” idea which is about to go Web 2.0* with Witness – the Hub, the “wiki-MyTube” version.

“People can suffer, then very effectively have their experiences denied, buried, forgotten. But it’s much harder with video,” says Gabriel. The Rodney King episode was seminal in getting the power of video accepted. Witness wanted to provide more cameras to record human rights abuses a decade ago. “Now the phone companies have done it for us.”

Gabriel’s early insight underlines the point that artists understand the issues and opportunities underlying major technological change far sooner than governments. They can be far more articulate in expressing empathy. Witness found that to create video advocacy – video as evidence, to educate an activist audience – needs training and production as much as cameras. They intend to focus on specific three year campaigns, with measured outputs, eg child soldiers on Congo, or enslavement in Brazil.

Acronyms: 0 (or does eg count?)
Neologisms: 2
*Proprietary expressions used without permission from O’Reilly: 1