The Participatory Panopticon and Human Rights: WITNESS' Experience Supporting Video Advocacy.

Video advocacy incorporates the tools of modern moving image media into campaigns for change in policy, practice or behavior. WITNESS (www.witness.org) has been one of the pioneers in this field - working with local human rights groups in over seventy countries to use video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. The paper reflects on the lessons WITNESS has learned partnering to create advocacy impact around visual evidence, testimony and stories, and using 'smart narrowcasting' of video to target domestic and international institutions including governments and decision-makers, UN and regional commissions, the media, an internet-based global public and others. It considers how Web 2.0 functionality and the advent of pervasive video capture devices and distribution options influence the capability and capacity to use video in advocacy, and expand the field of potential participants in documentation and activism. It goes on to consider the broader implications of what has been described as the emerging 'participatory panopticon' where everyone is watching everyone else, and considers in this light a new project, the Hub (hub.witness.org), at WITNESS - an online participatory media channel for sharing, watching and action on human rights media. The paper also addresses emerging issues related to human dignity and informed consent raised by new forms of remixing and reappropriation, as well as broader participation in image-making, and consider the normative responses that it may be appropriate to foster. Finally, it consider what modes of organized advocacy and action will be effective in a world of ubiquitous video production and distribution, considering the possibilities of a renewed form of targeted advocacy as well as the opportunities of distributed and collaborative production and distribution to create a new network-centered video advocacy that will draw on an increasingly broad range of participants, not just passive viewers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]