Witnessed presence

2008

How is the effectiveness of a representation defined? It lies in its ability to make present that which is not, to ensure the illusion of a presence. A representation is only effective if it is able to convince a subject interpreting signs – a reader, a spectator or a witness – that something is starting to appear, something that has nothing to do with her, something that seems to possess its own dynamic, a relative autonomy and an undeniable transparency whose primary effect is the impression of a significant permanence. Digital media are said to give rise to representations and effects of presence of an unsurpassed power. It is the myth of presence. I wish to explore this myth of presence that the digital brings to life. First, I will examine how digital media fulfil certain promises of the myth, thereby ensuring their credibility; and secondly, I will focus on their deconstruction to show their share of illusions. To do this, I will use a hypermedia work, entitled Adam’s Cam. Thi...

Mobile technologies are increasingly mundane, but they also function as lenses through which another mundane aspect of everyday life comes into view–the organization of space. One of my longer-term projects at the moment concerns the relationships between spatiality, technology, information, and practice. Much discussion of mobile technologies focuses on the ways in which everyday space can be made available as a site of consumption and social engagement. In this paper, I discuss a recent study of a quite ...

Image Testimony: Witnessing in Times of Social Media. Edited by Schankweiler, K. and Straub, V. and Wendi, T. Published by Routledge, 2019: 121-135., 2019

Published in: Schankweiler, K. and Straub, V. and Wendi, T. (eds.) Image Testimony: Witnessing in Times of Social Media. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019: 121-135. Many analyses of image testimonies in social media begin and end with the same assumption: that while social media are new means for circulating witnessing texts, they rarely provide their content. What we witness via Facebook, Twitter etc. tends not to be Facebook, Twitter, etc. In contrast, this paper asks what we can learn from instances where image testimonies are not just distributed through digital platforms, but also foreground key aspects of the medium itself. Proceeding through the close-reading of three examples, it explores how social media reconfigure existing modes of witnessing – eye-witnessing, flesh-witnessing and world-witnessing - to reveal the underlying techno-cultural potentialities and vulnerabilities of our networked lives. The power of these image testimonies derives not only from the topics they convey (injustice, suffering, death), but from their poetic ability to constitute digital networks themselves as witnessable worlds, as new domains of embodied being.

"""This paper is a discussion about presence and its relationship to ethical and moral behaviour. In particular, I problematise the notion of presence within a contemporary culture in which social life is increasingly lived and experienced through networked digital communication technologies alongside the physical presence of co-present bodies. Using the work of Heidegger, Levinas, Bauman and Turkel (among others), I suggest that the increasing use of these technologies and our increasing presence in online environments challenges our tendencies to ground moral and ethical behaviours in face-to-face or materially co-present contexts. Instead, the mediated presences we can achieve amplify our cultural tendency to objectify the social world and weaken our sense of moral and ethical responsibility to others. In that sense, an important disjuncture exists between the largely liminal space of online interactions and the ethical sensibilities of material presence which, as these two spheres become more intensely integrated, has potential consequences for the future of an ethical social world and a civil society. I use the examples of online suicides, trolling, cyberbullying to illustrate these ethical disjunctures. """

Communication Theory, 2019

This article proposes a theory of mediated presence, defined as the sense of presence-despite physical absence-made possible by technology. Pushing the boundaries of media, the theory integrates various notions of presence at a distance: telepresence in telecommunications and computer-mediated communication, liveness in broadcasting and on the Internet, and the epistolary presence of antiquity. Theoretically, it adopts a social construc-tivist approach to long-term communication history, with an emphasis on technological breakdowns. The core discussion addresses three criteria for a historical, comparative analysis of mediated presence: dissemination versus dialogue, transmission-reception time lags, and levels of disembodiment. Refuting axiological and technology-centered views of history, the article concludes that increased technological options for presence at a distance have remained essentially ambivalent for users who vacillate between the need for distance and the search for connection. This article proposes a theory of mediated presence, defined as a sense of the presence of one or more persons, despite their physical absence, through technological mediation. Covering human history since the advent of correspondence, the theory subsumes different notions of presence at a distance, originating in several research traditions: computer-mediated communications, telecommunications, and liveness in broadcasting and on the Internet, as well as the epistolary. Suggesting new dialogues between compartmented fields, it broadens the definition of media in long-term history through systematic comparisons and qualifies our contemporary sense of a radical change, born of recent technology affordances. I begin with a multidisciplinary review of theories of presence at a distance, then explain the use of the expression-mediated presence, which both broadens and specifies the notion of presence at a distance across technologies and historical contexts.

Rethinking history, 2020

In her seminal work ‘The era of the witness’ (1998, 2006) the French historian Annette Wieviorka has described the rise of the witness as key figure in the cultural memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War since the 1960s. This article elaborates on the concerns Wieviorka has expressed regarding what she referred to as the new technologies of dissemination, which have become ubiquitous by now: searchable online portals to video testimony collections. These testimony portals have two important characteristics: they ‘force’ users to choose from a large number of testimonies; and they reconfigure the relation between witness and audience. In effect, as will be argued with help of Caroline Wake’s notion of tertiary witnessing, a different approach to testimonies has emerged, in which the user is central, not the witness. As a case study, the online portal getuigenverhalen.nl (‘eyewitness stories’) is chosen, which contains nearly 500 video interviews about the Holocaust and the ...

Fast Capitalism, 2011

GeoHumanities, 2016

This article explores some of the geographies of crisis and conflict that have become increasingly visible through the use of digital technologies. It attends to the visual politics embedded within such images, whether these are photographs and videos shared through social media or maps produced on platforms such as Google Earth. It also discusses recent practices of spatial analysis that use a forensic approach. Through focusing on the Pakistani city of Gwadar in the restive Balochistan province, my aim is to reveal the complex layered narrative that emerges out of and about such a place through processes of visualization. Gwadar oscillates between an anticipated role as a strategic regional port and the present reality of being positioned at the periphery. By working through these narratives, I explore what type of ethical spatial engagement is possible with such places that are often constructed as out-of-bounds by governments and nonstate actors.