viz.

Andrew K. Woods has a short piece on Slate titled “The YouTube Defense: Human Rights Go Viral” where he argues that judicial decisions, from Brown v. Board of Education to recent rulings on Guantanamo detainees, have always used public opinion as a bellwether, despite claims of strict fidelity to established law. Realizing this, lawyers for one Gitmo inmate, Adel Hamad—who Mr. Woods identifies as a Sudanese school teacher—have posted a video on YouTube outlining the paucity of evidence supporting to his detainment. After 70,000 viewings, the U.S. government has placed Hamad on a list of detainees to be released.

These facts lead Mr. Woods to argue that Internet video provides the following benefits for human rights reporting: it allows anyone to report on abuses, and that reporting can instantly reach everyone with an web connection; it is more “visceral” than text; and it is “story first, message second,” allowing the video-makers to “capture [an audience’s] attention with the narrative, and slip the message in between the frames,” in this case, a message about human rights.

I generally agree with Mr. Woods’s claims about the differences between video and text, though perhaps not with his specifics—the Internet has been around for a while, and I’m sure someone knows of an example of a text-based (or text- and graphics-based) campaign that influenced some legal or governmental decision, and I’m not sure that, in their essential natures, text is quite so intellectual or video quite so emotional as Mr. Woods is claiming. The argument does, however, bring up the question: what benefits do video, and sites like YouTube, make available to human rights groups and others that would like to draw attention to arguments that would otherwise go unreported in the media?

Here is my suggestion: because video is richly contextual, that is, because it provides information about setting, behavior, physical appearance, and other details that would be tedious or merely time-consuming to list in print in their entirety, it allows for the greater likelihood of an audience member emphasizing with the subject—or being repelled by them; consider the difference in reaction to Mel Gibson and Michael Richards’s racial outbursts; how much of the public response to each has been mediated by the fact that most everyone has seen one outburst but not the other?—and therefore has the potential to be more persuasive. One downside of this effect is that text has the benefit of being streamlined; it is easier to focus an audience’s attention with text than with video. Also, more people are skilled producers of text than they are of video (though the gap between the two is quickly narrowing), making it likely that, at least for the foreseeable future, there will be rhetorical gaffes in video production.

With that caveat, however, I believe that Mr. Woods is correct. Video production on the web is going to propel major changes in the way groups without access to the media will be able to make arguments to wide audiences, thereby effecting changes in legal decisions and governmental policies.