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Article about Darnella Frazier, the teenager who filmed the murder of George Floyd

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Article about Darnella Frazier, the teenager who filmed the murder of George Floyd

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The Black teenager who recorded the now-infamous video of Derek Chauvin pressing his knee on George Floyd's neck for nearly 10 minutes last May is being hailed as a hero following the former Minneapolis police officer's conviction on murder and manslaughter charges.

Darnella Frazier, who was 17 at the time, testified during the trial that she has spent nights apologizing to Floyd for "not doing more." Now, people across the country - including Floyd's family, President Biden and numerous celebrities and elected officials - are crediting her bravery and quick thinking in capturing the video that they say made the guilty verdict possible.

After the jury convicted Chauvin of all three charges, Frazier shared a post on social media expressing her relief and thanking God. "Justice has been served," she added.

Frazier had been taking her 9-year-old cousin to Cup Foods last Memorial Day when she saw police officers holding Floyd on the asphalt near the rear of a police vehicle, a scene she described during her testimony as that of "a man terrified, scared, begging for his life."

She sent her cousin inside the store and began filming. The 10-minute video she posted to Facebook has since been seen by millions and became a central piece of evidence in Chauvin's trial.

"When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad, my brothers, my cousins, my uncles, because they are all Black," Frazier said from the witness stand. "I look at how that could have been one of them."

The graphic video captured a scene drastically at odds withthe initial police statement, which described the encounter as: "man dies after medical incident during police interaction." It said that Floyd physically resisted officers and made no mention of the prolonged restraint.

Many social media users and public figures are praising Frazier for taking the video, which they credit with disproving the police narrative and facilitating the trial's historic outcome.

Police officers are rarely convicted of murder for on-duty killings, and Chauvin is just the second such case in Minnesota's history.

In remarks delivered Tuesday, Biden alsonoted how rare such a verdict is and said Chauvin's conviction seems for many people to have been the result of "a unique and extraordinary convergence of factors" - including "a brave young woman with a smartphone camera."

Angela Harrelson, Floyd's aunt, lauded Frazier's bravery in a Wednesday interview with CNN.

"It really doesn't surprise me that much, with police cover-ups, because they've always had done that, especially towards Black and brown people," Harrelson said. "The sad thing is if it hadn't been for that 17-year-old girl Darnella, it would have been another Black man, that was killed by the police, his own fault, and they would have said, 'Oh, it was drugs, oh it was this.' And we would never have had the story we would have and wouldn't be here today talking."

Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore wrote in a tweet that Frazier had changed the world, adding, "No film in our time has been more important than yours." Journalist Ann Marie Lipinski called it "one of the most important civil rights documents in a generation."

Some have called for Frazier to receive the Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism. Melvin Carter, the mayor of St. Paul, Minn., wrote, "What work of media has been more consequential in the past year?"

"She is a stellar example of how everyday people can be powerful in documenting injustice and creating momentum for accountability," tweeted Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.

History should remember the incredibly 17 year old Darnella Frazier who had the strength and composure to capture the murder of #georgefloyd on video. Without her video there may never have been #justice.
- Valerie Jarrett (@ValerieJarrett) April 20, 2021

Frazier has received one award already - from PEN America, the nonprofit organization focused on freedom of expression. The legendary producer, director and screenwriter Spike Lee presented Frazier with an award for courage at a virtual ceremony in December.

"She documented the murder of George Floyd, our brother. King Floyd. And that footage reverberated around this God's earth, and people took to the streets all over this Earth," Lee said. "Not just the United States of America, and it wasn't just Black people either."

At the ceremony, a slew of high-profile figures - including actors Gabrielle Union and Meryl Streep, civil rights activists DeRay Mckesson and Anita Hill, and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. - offered their praise and thanks in a series of brief video clips.

"I never would imagine out of my whole 17 years of living that this will be me," Frazier said as she accepted the award. "It's just a lot to take in, but I couldn't say 'thank you' enough for everything that's been coming towards me."

In the wake of the trial, supporters of Frazier are expressing their gratitude as well as their hopes that she will continue to receive support.

Frazier testified that she felt like she was in danger at the time and that police were threatening bystanders with Mace as they called for officers to stop hurting Floyd and render medical attention.

Many have noted that the experience and resulting trauma will stay with her permanently.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about the traumatized witnesses to Floyd's murder. Especially the young people. Darnella Frazier, the teen who filmed it. The store clerk who blames himself. I can't get them out of my mind. I hope the verdict brings them some peace.
- Lauren Williams (@laurenwilliams) April 20, 2021

Bernice King, CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, posted a tweet wishing "emotional healing" for Frazier, while journalist Evette Dionne offered prayers for the safety of Frazier and other bystanders who "now have a city police department's bullseye on their back."

Others are sharing the link to an online fundraiser titled "Peace and Healing for Darnella Fund," which was created last May and has raised more than $630,000 as of midday Wednesday.

"In addition to the trauma of watching a black man be murdered by police, she has had to deal with trolls, bullies and ignorant people harassing her online," organizers wrote. "It took unbelievable courage for her to stand there and bear witness to such an awful tragedy. We all have our roles to play in the revolution against white supremacy. Darnella played an important one and should be uplifted, not shamed."

In an update on Tuesday, organizer Mica Cole Kamenski said that while the fundraiser had originally been established to support Frazier's immediate healing and well-being, contributors wanted to provide the financial resources to ensure her long-term safety and that proceeds from the fundraiser will be transferred to a trust in Frazier's name.

Kamenski added that "because of Darnella Frazier, we saw a glimpse of accountability today."

"The support I had since day one carried me a long way," Frazier wrote on Facebook on Tuesday. "So thank you all again, thank you."

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Darnella Frazier, Teen Who Filmed Floyd's Murder, Praised For Making Verdict Possible

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The Black teenager who recorded the now-infamous video of Derek Chauvin pressing his knee on George Floyd's neck for nearly 10 minutes last May is being hailed as a hero following the former Minneapolis police officer's conviction on murder and manslaughter charges.

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Stuart Hall - Representation Theory (NOT RECEPTION)

bell hooks - Intersectionality

Judith Butler - Gender Performativity

David Gauntlett - Media and Identity

Cultivation Theory - George Gerber

James Curran and Jean Seaton - Ownership Effects

David Hesmondhalgh - The Culture Industry

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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A-Level Media - Formation by Beyonce - Representation - Simple Guide for students & teachers

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How much power the media has over audiences depends on how you think people engage with media. If audiences are passive then it would suggest the media has a huge influence over how people think. If you think audience are active then it suggests they can be critical and independent in how they interpret media.

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- to understand the role audience plays in the media process of production, distribution and exhibition (AO1)

- to understand the relationship audience has with institutions (AO1)

- to explore audience theories (AO4)

- to expand and use terminology appropriately (AO1)

Many theories try to make sense of the question: What effects do media texts have on audiences?

When you are studying audiences you will find that there are a lot of different theories about why some television programmes have a large audience and others do not, and why people buy certain things and not others.

There are also theories about the effect that 'media' has on audiences. This question has interested people ever since the invention of the printing press, and it became possible to make hundreds of copies of a document, and a 'message' could reach a mass audience.

Hierarchy of Needs

An American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, suggested that we all have different layers of needs. We have to achieve certain needs before going on to the next layer.

His Hierarchy of Needs suggests that once people have their basic needs met like housing, food, safety, shopping, technology, and a job, they can then go on to satisfy successively 'higher needs' that occupy a set hierarchy or system of ranking.
Maslow studied well-respected people such as Albert Einstein, and American presidents, and he studied one percent of the healthiest college student population.

<<<He came up with this pyramid where basic needs are at the bottom and at the top something called 'self actualisation'. This describes a person who has gained the respect of a lot of other people - perhaps a prime minister - and has a high level of self-esteem and self-respect.

What has this go to do with media texts?

It is very relevant to advertisers, and institutions that carry advertising - newspapers, cinema, television and radio channels.

Maslow's upper levels at the top of the pyramid are about self-esteem and gaining the respect of others. This can be linked to the idea that consuming particular media texts fulfils self-esteem, as does buying certain products.

In a nutshell, Maslow is suggesting that if you buy a new pair of trainers of the right brand, as shown to you on in the media, then you will feel better about yourself, because you have the respect of other people.

Can you prove or disprove this theory from your experience? Do you have any examples to share?

Needs: Activity

Draw a blank triangle. Fill in each level of with examples of media texts which attempt to fulfil that particular level of needs in Maslow's pyramid.

For example, take the second from bottom layer - safety needs. An advertisement for car insurance or life insurance offers a general level of safety needs.

Some cars are sold on their safety features - what does this tell us about the audience (people) who buy a car for these reasons?

Now construct an audience for a particular product of your choice (e.g. perfume, soft drinks, smartphones, take away pizza, romantic comedy films, etc)using the hierarchy of needs, and the psychographic system.

It is important to be able to 'read' or understand a target audience, and to understand if a media product has succeeded or not in getting across to its target audience.

Passive Audiences

Researchers investigating the effect of media on audiences have considered the audience in two distinct ways.

The earliest idea was that a mass audience is passive and inactive. The members of the audience are seen as couch potatoes just sitting there consuming media texts - particularly commercial television programmes.

It was thought that this did not require the active use of the brain. The audience accepts and believes all messages in any media text that they receive. This is the passive audience model.

The Hypodermic Model

In this model, the media is seen as powerful and able to inject ideas into an audience who are seen as weak and passive.

The hypodermic needle was proposed by Harold Lasswell in the 1920s. Also known as the 'Magic bullet theory', it explains how the audience is directly affected by what they view and hear. It is said to affect the audience/viewer immediately or in the near future.

It suggests that a media text can 'inject' or 'fire' ideas, values and attitudes into a This theory suggests that the passive audience, who might then act upon them. This theory also suggests that a media text has only one message which the audience must pick up. audience is powerless towards resisting the impact of the message which, in some cases, could be dangerous.

This appeared to be the case in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, leading up to the second World War. Powerful German films, such as Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, Germany, 1935), seemed to use propaganda methods to 'inject' ideas pr omoting the Nazi cause into the German audience.

In 1957, an American theorist, Vane Packard, who was working in advertising, wrote an influential book called The Hidden Persuaders. This book suggested that advertisers were able to manipulate audiences and persuade them to buy things they may not want to buy. This suggested advertisers had power over audiences. In fact, this has since proved to be an unreliable model, as modern audiences are too sophisticated.

This theory stems from a fear of the mass-media, and gives the media much more power than it can ever have in a democracy. Also, it ignores the obvious fact that not everyone in an audience behaves in the same way.

How can an audience be passive?

Think of all the times you have disagreed with something on television, or just not laughed at a new comedy.

What do you think of this theory?

Cultivation Theory

This theory also treats the audience as passive. It suggests that repeated exposure to the same message - such as an advertisement - will have an effect on the audience's attitudes and values. A similar idea is known as desensitisation, which suggests that long-term exposure to violent media makes the audience less likely to be shocked by violence. Being less shocked by violence, the audience may then be more likely to behave violently.

The criticism of this theory is that screen violence is not the same as real violence. Many people have been exposed to screen murder and violence, but there is no evidence at all that this has led audiences to be less shocked by real killings and violence. Also, this theory treats the audience as passive, which is an outdated concept.

Two Step Flow Theory

Katz and Lazarsfeld assumes a slightly more active audience. It suggests messages from the media move in two distinct ways.

First, individuals who are opinion leaders, receive messages from the media and pass on their own interpretations, in addition to the actual media content. The information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience, but is filtered through the opinion leaders, who then pass it on to a more passive audience.

The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media, with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders. They are not being influenced by a direct process, but by a two-step flow.

This theory appeared to reduce the power of the media, and some researchers concluded that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpret texts. This led to the idea of active audiences.

Active Audiences

This newer model sees the audience not as couch potatoes, but as individuals who are active and interact with the communication process and use media texts for their own purposes. They are prosumers (producers and consumers).

We behave differently because we are different people from different backgrounds with many different attitudes, values, experiences and ideas.

This is the active audience model, and is now generally considered to be a better and more realistic way to talk about audiences.

Uses and Gratifications Model

This model stems from the idea that audiences are a complex mixture of individuals who select media texts that best suits their needs - this goes back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs above.

The users and gratifications model suggests that media audiences are active and make active decisions about what they consume in relation to their social and cultural setting and their needs.

This was summed up by theorists . This means that audiences choose to watch programmes that make them feel good (gratifications), e.g. dramas and sitcoms, or that give them information that they can use (uses), e.g. news or information about new products or the world about them.

'Media usage can be explained in that it provides gratifications (meaning it satisfies needs) related to the satisfaction of social and psychological needs'. Blumler and Katz in 1974

Blumler and Katz (1975) identified four main uses:

Surveillance - our need to know what is going on in the world. This relates to Maslow's need for security. By keeping up to date with news about local and international events, we feel we have the knowledge to avoid or deal with dangers.

Personal relationships - our need for to interact with other people. This is provided by forming virtual relationships with characters in soaps, films and all kinds of drama, and other programmes and other media texts.

Personal identity - our need to define our identity and sense of self. Part of our sense of self is informed by making judgements about all sorts of people and things. This is also true of judgements we make about TV and film characters, and celebrities. Our choice of music, the shows we watch, the stars we like can be an expression of our identities. One aspect of this type of gratification is known as value reinforcement. This is where we choose television programmes or newspapers that have similar beliefs to those we hold.

Diversion - the need for escape, entertainment and relaxation. All types of television programmes can be 'used' to wind down and offer diversion, as well as satisfying some of the other needs at the same time.

Reception Analysis

Reception analysis is an active audience theory that looks at how audiences interact with a media text taking into account their 'situated culture' - this is their daily life.

This theory was put forward by Professor Stuart Hall in 'The Television Discourse - Encoding/Decoding' in 1974, with later research by David Morley and Charlotte Brunsden.

The theory suggests that social and daily experiences can affect the way an audience reads a media text and reacts to it.

Hall suggests that an audience has a significant role in the process of reading a text, and this can be discussed in three different ways:

The Dominant or Preferred Reading. The audience shares the code of the text and fully accepts its preferred meaning as intended by the producers .

The Negotiated Reading. The audience partly shares the code of the text and broadly accepts the preferred meaning but can change the meaning in some way according to their own experiences.

The Oppositional Reading. The audience understands the preferred meaning but does not share the text's code and rejects this intended meaning. This can be called a radical reading that may be, say Marxist or feminist or right wing

Interactive Audiences

The internet has opened up new ways to receive and interact with information. We can 'read' texts that are downloaded to our computers, or mobiles, or watch TV-on-demand and not just when the broadcasters want us to receive it. We can access music and film wherever we are with an Internet connection. We have access to media 24/7.

A prosumer is a person who consumes and produces media. It is derived from "prosumption", a dot-com era business term meaning "production by consumers". These terms were coined by American futurist Alvin Toffler, and were widely used by many technology writers of the time. It applies to the fact that we can CREATE our own media and contribute, generating our own audiences. T he real power of the audience seems to lie in being able to take part in a media text. Twenty-first-century audiences are creating their own distribution systems without mediation from institutions or companies. Websites such as YouTube, Instagram and blogs offer new possibilities for audiences.

It is what we do and what we spend our money on that gives an audience its value, and to some extent its power. Things that influence audiences include new technologies. New technologies, in turn, influence audiences and institutions.

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to understand the role audience plays in the media process of production, distribution and exhibition (AO1) - to understand the relationship audience has with institutions (AO1) - to explore audience theories (AO4) - to expand and use terminology appropriately (AO1) Many theories try to make sense of the question: What effects do media texts have on audiences?

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This has some good discussion of what historical events Beyonce is referencing.

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Formation, Beyoncé - Eduqas A Level Media Studies

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Rhetoric of British Papers about the Migrant Crisis

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Rhetoric of British Papers about the Migrant Crisis

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If you want to understand the populist media's underlying agenda then you have to look not only at what gets published, but what doesn't.

Remember the great peril that threatened to bring Britain to its knees, consigning our history and culture to the dustbin of history? What, you've forgotten already?

I'm talking about immigration. It was the press phenomenon of the age 10 years ago, and for at least the following six years - right up to the EU referendum. Since then, however, immigration has all but disappeared from newspaper pages.

References to migrants, asylum seekers and refugees have almost vanished along with the associated prejudicial buzzwords and phrases, such as swamping, influx, surge, illegal, bogus, sham, jungle, welfare scroungers, benefit tourists.

Remember those dehumanising, derogatory metaphors such as parasites, leeches and cockroaches? Gone ... at least for the moment.

We were told the UK was full up and there was no room for anyone else. Images of the world's poor on the verge of "invading" Britain were painted in numerous articles. Immigration was, supposedly, a crisis of unimaginable proportions.

The daily newspaper diet of large anti-migrant headlines, accompanied by xenophobic columnists retailing thinly veiled racist rhetoric, was so common it became a cliché for us critics to complain about it. Yet as much as we railed against it, editors redoubled their efforts, ignoring rational arguments that exposed their distorted agenda.

Britain was not alone in dealing with the arrival of migrants and refugees. It was happening in every European country, but in 2015 researchers from Cardiff University's journalism school found that British press coverage was strikingly more polarised and aggressive than in newspapers across the rest of Europe.

In 2016, a disturbing analysis revealed that the Daily Express had carried 179 front pages in five years devoted to anti-migrant stories, while the Daily Mail had published 122. Through repetition, disinformation, misinformation - warnings of "hordes" to come from various war-torn or impoverished countries - and the omission of any positive material, papers incited fears of immigrants. Migrants, readers were told, were being treated to more homes, more jobs and more generous benefits than the indigenous population.

It is painful, but necessary, to remind ourselves of just some of the 301 Express-Mail propaganda pages: "Illegal migrants flood in", "Migrant chaos all summer", "Asylum seekers ferried around in stretch limo", "Migrants rob young Britons of jobs", "500,000 migrants get social housing", "Britain's 40% surge in ethnic numbers".

A Daily Mail headline from October 2014, "You can't ignore migration now", which was based on a single Ukip election victory.

Yet, in 2020, newspapers are, indeed, ignoring migration. Admittedly, the Daily Express is under more responsible ownership (the Daily Mirror's publisher, Reach) while the Daily Mail is edited by a man (Geordie Greig) who no longer feels it appropriate to provoke the bigotry of a chauvinist readership.

But those factors alone, while they should be applauded, do not account for the muted coverage of immigration over the past year or so. Nor am I naive enough to think it couldn't kick off all over again, because it's there in the background.

Yet the undeniable truth, the sad, sick, unvarnished truth, is that migration is off the media's central agenda for two reasons. Firstly, it is no longer a political issue. With the pro-Brexit vote having been achieved, there is no need to keep on injecting the same poison into public debate. Job done.

Secondly, seen from the newspaper editors' perspective, it is not a sales-winning topic at present. No need to play to the gallery. There is no "value" in running anti-immigrant stories.

Given that news is what editors say it is at any given moment, then they believe it amounts to yesterday's news.

In fact, it never was news. It was a wholly media-manufactured "crisis". Facts, such as those detailed in a BBC briefing about immigration last week, were ignored in favour of appealing to public prejudice.

I am not doubting this prejudice exists, but it is the result of a failure by postwar governments, along with a reactionary press, to explain why Britain needed immigration and why a multicultural society should be embraced.

Instead, editors preferred to accentuate the negative. They readily published anecdotal evidence of individual misbehaviour as if it was a universal problem created by immigration. Then there were the dodgy figures, as if plucked from mid-air, that suggested Britain was about to be overrun.

Now, to get a grip on just how influential media coverage has been, note recent fascinating findings from YouGov. In its poll weeks before the referendum, when anti-migrant press coverage was at its zenith, 56% thought "immigration and asylum" were the most important issues facing Britain. Weeks later, soon after the vote, that was down to 46%.

By the following year, with the press already beginning to tail off its migration coverage, the number had fallen to 35%. Much more telling is the most recent set of findings.

Of the 24 polls in 2019, the average number of people who believed immigration was the key issue was 23%, with the latest total standing at just 20%.

In other words, the downplaying of immigration in newspapers has been mirrored by the public's attitude towards the subject. Lack of coverage equals lack of interest. Where is that "crisis" of 2016 in 2020? It does not exist because it never did exist.

It may be, given their terminal decline, that newspapers are never able to mount such a campaign again.

So what? They have already done their worst by encouraging and exploiting deep divisions in society while splitting us off from Europe. Now that really is a crisis.
Topics

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Migrants are off the agenda for the UK press, but the damage is done

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If you want to understand the populist media's underlying agenda then you have to look not only at what gets published, but what doesn't. Remember the great peril that threatened to bring Britain to its knees, consigning our history and culture to the dustbin of history? What, you've forgotten already?

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Media Studies - Alvarado’s Theory Of Ethnicity & Racial Stereotypes - A Simple Guide

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Media Ownership article and infographics

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Media Ownership article and infographics

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These 6 corporations control 90% of the media outlets in America. The illusion of choice and objectivity

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TechStartups - Coverage of Technology News, technology startups, Emerging technology, venture capital funding, and Silicon Valley

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Ownership Effects - Curran and Seaton.pdf

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"Luffy reminds me a lot of me, when I was a little kid." When Iñaki Godoy received the news he got the role of Luffy, he knew it would change his life forever. From keeping his own 'One Piece' journal where he kept notes on every episode to putting on the straw hat for the first time, Iñaki Godoy truly manifested his pirate dreams. Iñaki breaks down his entire process for the 'One Piece' live-action, from studying original voice actor Mayumi Tanaka's legendary dubbing, working alongside director Marc Jobst on set, seeing the incredible set come to life, and so much more. SAG-AFTRA members are currently on strike; as part of the strike, union actors are not promoting their film and TV projects. This video was conducted prior to the strike. Director: Adam Lance Garcia Director of Photography: Jack Belisle Producer: Madison Coffey Associate Producer: Rafael Vasquez Production Manager: Natasha Soto-Albors Talent Booker: Mica Medoff Camera Operator: Alfonso Audio Engineer: Rehanna Chandan, Michael Guggino Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Post Production Coordinator: Scout Alter Supervising Editor: Erica Dillman Assistant Editor: Jason Malizia Graphics Supervisor: Ross Rackin

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7 Reasons Beyoncé's "Formation" Music Video Is a Powerful Statement During Black History Month

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Three months of quarantine taught us to live online, so it's perhaps unsurprising that it was what we saw online that sent us back onto the streets. On May 25th, the circulation of video footage capturing George Floyd's murder by four Minneapolis police officers quickly incited local protests. Three nights later, our feeds streamed with live images of protesters burning Minneapolis's Third Police Precinct. In the course of June, uprisings expanded at unprecedented speed and scale-growing nationally and then internationally, leaving a series of now iconic images, videos, and exhortations in their wake. Every historic event has its ideal medium of documentation-the novel, the photograph, the television-and what we're witnessing feels like an exceptionally "online" moment of social unrest.

Indeed, the struggle in the public square has unfolded alongside a takeover of the virtual one. Amid cell-phone footage of protests and toppling statues, the Internet has been further inundated with what we might call activist media. Screenshots of bail-fund donations urging others to match continue to proliferate. Protest guides, generated from years of on-the-ground activist experience, are readily shared over Twitter and Instagram, telling readers how to blur faces in photographs or aid in de-arrests. There are e-mail and phone-call templates, pre-scripted and mass-circulated. Webinars about police abolition now constitute their own subgenre. And city-council meetings, which had already migrated to Zoom because of the pandemic, have come to host the hallowed activist tradition of town-hall agitation. (Well-timed appeals for the police department to "suck my dick," it turns out, can be as effective online as off.) As some of June's uprisings evolve into today's encampments, the long revolutionary summer of 2020-made all the longer by quarantine-continues apace online.

Some of this story may seem familiar. In " Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest," from 2017, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci examined how a "digitally networked public sphere" had come to shape social movements. Tufekci drew on her own experience of the 2011 Arab uprisings, whose early mobilization of social media set the stage for the protests at Gezi Park, in Istanbul, the Occupy action, in New York City, and the Black Lives Matter movement, in Ferguson. For Tufekci, the use of the Internet linked these various, decentralized uprisings and distinguished them from predecessors such as the nineteen-sixties civil-rights movement. Whereas "older movements had to build their organizing capacity first," Tufekci argued, "modern networked movements can scale up quickly and take care of all sorts of logistical tasks without building any substantial organizational capacity before the first protest or march."

The speed afforded by such protest is, however, as much its peril as its promise. After a swift expansion, spontaneous movements are often prone to what Tufekci calls "tactical freezes." Because they are often leaderless, and can lack "both the culture and the infrastructure for making collective decisions," they are left with little room to adjust strategies or negotiate demands. At a more fundamental level, social media's corporate infrastructure makes such movements vulnerable to coöptation and censorship. Tufekci is clear-eyed about these pitfalls, even as she rejects the broader criticisms of "slacktivism" laid out, for example, by Evgeny Morozov's "The Net Delusion," from 2011.

"Twitter and Tear Gas" remains trenchant about how social media can and cannot enact reform. But movements change, as does technology. Since Tufekci's book was published, social media has helped represent-and, in some cases, helped organize-the Arab Spring 2.0, France's "Yellow Vest" movement, Puerto Rico's RickyLeaks, the 2019 Iranian protests, the Hong Kong protests, and what we might call the B.L.M. uprising of 2020. This last event, still ongoing, has evinced a scale, creativity, and endurance that challenges those skeptical of the Internet's ability to mediate a movement. As Tufekci notes in her book, the real-world effects of Occupy, the Women's March, and even Ferguson-era B.L.M. were often underwhelming. By contrast, since George Floyd's death, cities have cut billions of dollars from police budgets; school districts have severed ties with police; multiple police-reform-and-accountability bills have been introduced in Congress; and cities like Minneapolis have vowed to defund policing. Plenty of work remains, but the link between activism, the Internet, and material action seems to have deepened. What's changed?

The current uprisings slot neatly into Tufekci's story, with one exception. As the flurry of digital activism continues, there is no sense that this movement is unclear about its aims- abolition-or that it might collapse under a tactical freeze. Instead, the many protest guides, syllabi, Webinars, and the like have made clear both the objectives of abolition and the digital savvy of abolitionists. It is a message so legible that even Fox News grasped it with relative ease. Rachel Kuo, an organizer and scholar of digital activism, told me that this clarity has been shaped partly by organizers who increasingly rely on "a combination of digital platforms, whether that's Google Drive, Signal, Messenger, Slack, or other combinations of software, for collaboration, information storage, resource access, and daily communications." The public tends to focus, understandably, on the profusion of hashtags and sleek graphics, but Kuo stressed that it was this "back end" work-an inventory of knowledge, a stronger sense of alliance-that has allowed digital activism to "reflect broader concerns and visions around community safety, accessibility, and accountability." The uprisings might have unfolded organically, but what has sustained them is precisely what many prior networked protests lacked: preëxisting organizations with specific demands for a better world.

Some of this growth is simply a function of time. It has been seven years since Black Lives Matter was founded. Since then, groups such as the Movement for Black Lives-an explicitly abolitionist, anti-capitalist network that includes more than a hundred and fifty organizations-have lent unity and direction to a coalition that was once, perhaps, too diffuse to articulate shared principles. These groups have also become better at using the Internet to frame, formalize, and advance their agenda. As Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles write in "#HashtagActivism," social media provides a digital "counterpublic," in which voices excluded from "elite media spaces" can engage "alternative networks of debate." When moments of rupture occur, this counterpublic can more readily make mainstream interventions. Recent discourse about prison and police abolition might be the clearest example of a shift in the Overton window, though Bailey points even to "the language that we're hearing on television, white supremacy being named for what it is," as unimaginable just a few years ago.

What's distinct about the current movement is not just the clarity of its messaging, but its ability to convey that message through so much noise. On June 2nd, the music industry launched #BlackoutTuesday, an action against police brutality that involved, among other things, Instagram and Facebook users posting plain black boxes to their accounts. The posts often included the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter; almost immediately, social-media users were inundated with even more posts, which explained why using that hashtag drowned out crucial information about events and resources with a sea of mute boxes. For Meredith Clark, a media-studies professor at the University of Virginia, the response illustrated how the B.L.M. movement had honed its ability to stick to a program, and to correct those who deployed that program naïvely. In 2014, many people had only a thin sense of how a hashtag could organize actions or establish circles of care. Today, "people understand what it means to use a hashtag," Clark told me. They use "their own social media in a certain way to essentially quiet background noise" and "allow those voices that need to connect with each other the space to do so." The #BlackoutTuesday affair exemplified an increasing awareness of how digital tactics have material consequences.

Another example arrived on June 3rd, when Campaign Zero-a Black Lives Matter branch often associated with the activist DeRay Mckesson-launched a campaign, #8cantwait, to "reduce police violence." The campaign endorsed a reformist platform, which included banning choke holds and enforcing deëscalation training; it was widely circulated, and won support from names like Jon Lovett and Ariana Grande. By the end of that weekend, though, the campaign had been roundly criticized as too moderate-and perhaps even misleading, as many of its proposals had already been adopted-and it was abandoned by many within and without the B.L.M. movement. In response, a "group of abolitionist comrades," in the words of the human-rights lawyer Derecka Purnell, presented a competing campaign with its own hashtag: #8toabolition. The immense speed with which #8toabolition was born and broadcast illustrates the tactical efficiency of today's abolitionists. When I spoke to three of #8toabolition's co-writers-Mon Mohapatra, Reina Sultan, and Rachel Kuo-over Zoom, they told me that their campaign's demands were drafted by ten different activists in a shared Google doc in the course of twenty-four hours. That speed was enabled by the networks of trust and collaboration built through years of organizing.

These networks suggest that digital activism has entered a second act, in which the tools of the Internet have been increasingly integrated into the hard-won structure of older movements. Though, as networked protest grows in scale and popularity, it still risks being hijacked by the mainstream. Any urgent circulation of information-the same memes filtering through your Instagram stories, the same looping images retweeted into your timeline-can be numbing, and any shift in the Overton window means that hegemony drifts with it. You know something has gone wrong when the San Francisco 49ers post a #BlackoutTuesday box. From the renaming (and repainting) of " Black Lives Matter Plaza " by the mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, to ahistorical citations of Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s speeches, the discourse of Black struggle remains open to aggressive co-optation. The meme-ification of Breonna Taylor's death-in which calls to arrest her killers are prefaced by mundane observations about, say, the weather-may be the most depressing example yet of how social media can trivialize a movement.

In "Twitter and Tear Gas," Tufekci wrote, "The Black Lives Matter movement is young, and how it will develop further capacities remains to be seen." The movement is older now. It has developed its tactics, its messaging, its reach-but perhaps its most striking new capacity is a sharper recognition of social media's limits. "This movement has mastered what social media is good for," Deva Woodly, a professor of politics at the New School, told me. "And that's basically the meme: it's the headline." Those memes, Woodly said, help "codify the message" that leads to broader, deeper conversations offline, which, in turn, build on a long history of radical pedagogy. As more and more of us join those conversations, prompted by the words and images we see on our screens, it's clear that the revolution will not be tweeted-at least, not entirely.

Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests

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Three months of quarantine taught us to live online, so it's perhaps unsurprising that it was what we saw online that sent us back onto the streets. On May 25th, the circulation of video footage capturing George Floyd's murder by four Minneapolis police officers quickly incited local protests.

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Aylan Kurdi: Drowned in a Sea of Pictures

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Aylan Kurdi: Drowned in a Sea of Pictures

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Aylan Kurdi: drowned in a sea of pictures - Docu - 2016

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How the media reports the migrant crisis

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How the media reports the migrant crisis

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When did you notice the word "migrant" start to take precedence over the many other terms applied to people on the move? For me it was in 2015, as the refugee crisis in Europe reached its peak. While debate raged over whether people crossing the Mediterranean via unofficial routes should be regarded as deserving candidates for European sympathy and protection, it seemed as if that word came to crowd out all others. Unlike the other terms, well-meaning or malicious, that might be applied to people in similar situations, this one word appears shorn of context; without even an im- or an em- attached to it to indicate that the people it describes have histories or futures. Instead, it implies an endless present: they are migrants, they move, it's what they do. It's a form of description that, until 2015, I might have expected to see more often in nature documentaries, applied to animals rather than human beings.

But only certain kinds of human beings. The professional who moves to a neighbouring city for work is not usually described as a migrant, and neither is the wealthy businessman who acquires new passports as easily as he moves his money around the world. It is most often applied to those people who fall foul of border control at the frontiers of the rich world, whether that's in Europe, the US, Australia, South Africa or elsewhere. That's because the terms that surround migration are inextricably bound up with power, as is the way in which our media organisations choose to disseminate them.

The people I met during the years I spent reporting on the experiences of refugees at Europe's borders, for my book Lights in the Distance, were as keenly aware of this as any of us. There was the fixer I was introduced to in Bulgaria, a refugee himself, who was offering TV news crews a "menu" of stories of suffering, with a price range that corresponded with the value the media placed on them. Caesar, a young man from Mali I met in Sicily, told me he was shocked to find that Italian television would usually only show images of Africa in reports about war or poverty. Some refugees' stories, he felt, were treated with more urgency than others because of what country they came from. Or there was Hakima, an Afghan woman who lived with her family in Athens, who confronted me directly: "We keep having journalists visit, and they want to hear our stories, but, tell me, what can you do?" Often, people I met were surprised at the lack of understanding, even indifference, they felt was being shown to them. Didn't Europe know why people like them were forced to make these journeys? Hadn't Europe played an intimate role in the histories and conflicts of their own countries?

Europe's refugee crisis, or more properly, a disaster partly caused by European border policies, rather than simply the movement of refugees towards Europe, was one of the most heavily mediated world events of the past decade. It unfolded around the edges of a wealthy and technologically developed region, home to several major centres of the global media industry. Scenes of desperation, suffering and rescue that might normally be gathered by foreign correspondents in harder-to-access parts of the world were now readily available to reporters, news crews, filmmakers and artists at relatively low cost.

The people at the centre of the crisis were, at least for a time, relatively free to move around once they had reached safety and to speak to whoever they pleased. This gave certain advantages to the kind of media coverage that was produced. Most of all, it allowed quick and clear reporting on emergency situations as they developed. Throughout 2015, the crisis narrative was developed via a series of flashpoints at different locations within and around the European Union. In April, for example, attention focused on the smuggler boat route from Libya, after the deadliest shipwreck ever recorded in the Mediterranean. A month or so later focus shifted to Calais, where French and British policies of discouraging irregular migrants from attempting to cross the Channel had led to a growing spectacle of mass destitution. By the summer, the number of boat crossings from Turkey to Greece had dramatically increased, and images and stories of people stepping on to Aegean shores, or of piles of orange lifejackets, came to dominate. Then came the scenes of people moving through the Balkans, and so on, and so on.

Kara Tepe refugee camp on Lesbos in Greece. The men, mostly Syrians, are anxiously waiting for registration papers, July 2015. Photograph: Jillian Edelstein

In all of these situations the news media were able to do their basic job in emergency situations, which is to communicate what's happening, who's affected, what's needed the most. But this is usually more than a matter of relaying dry facts and figures. "Human stories" have the greatest currency among journalists, although it's an odd term if you think about it.

What stories aren't human? In fact, it's most commonly used to denote a particular kind of human story; one that gives individual experience the greatest prominence, that tells you what an event felt like, both physically and emotionally. It rests on the assumption that this is what connects most strongly with audiences: either because it hooks them in and keeps them watching or reading, or because it helps them identify with the protagonist, perhaps in a way that encourages empathy, or a particular course of action in response. As a result, the public was able to easily and quickly access vivid accounts and images of people's experiences as they attempted to cross the EU's external borders, or to find shelter and welcome within Europe.

The trade-off was that this often fit into predetermined ideas about what disasters look like, who needs protection, who is innocent and who is deserving of blame. Think, for example, about the most recognisable image of the refugee crisis in 2015: the picture of a Turkish police officer carrying the lifeless body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi away from the water's edge on a beach near Bodrum.

As the Dutch documentary Een zee van beelden - A Sea of Images - (Medialogica, 2016) asked: why did this image in particular strike such a chord? After all, many news editors see images of death on a daily basis, yet for the most part decide to exclude them. The documentary showed how the apparently viral spread of the Alan Kurdi photograph on social media was in large part the result of a series of decisions taken by senior journalists and NGO workers.

Refugees after landing on Lesbos, July 2015. Photograph: Jillian Edelstein

First, a local photo agency in Turkey decided to release the image to the wires because they were so fed up with the lack of political response to the crisis on their shores. The image was shared by an official at a global human rights NGO with a large Twitter following, and retweeted by several prominent correspondents for large news organisations. Picture editors at several newspapers then decided, independently of one another, to place the photo on the front pages of their next editions; only after that point did it reach its widest circulation online. The image gained the status it did for a mix of reasons - political, commercial, but also aesthetic. One of the picture editors interviewed in the documentary commented on how the position of the figures in the photo resembled that of Michelangelo's Pietà, an iconography of suffering and sacrifice that runs deep in European culture.

But if this way of working has its advantages, it also has its dark side. News media that rush from one crisis point to another are not so good at filling in the gaps, at explaining the obscured systems and long-term failures that might be behind a series of seemingly unconnected events. To return to the idea of a "refugee crisis", for example, this is an accurate description in one sense, as it involved a sharp increase in the number of people claiming asylum in the European Union; from around 430,000 in 2013, according to the EU statistics agency Eurostat, to well over a million in 2015 and 2016 each. In global terms this was a relatively small number of refugees: the EU has a population of over 500 million, while most of the world's 68.5 million forcibly displaced people are hosted in poorer parts of the world. But the manner of people's arrival was chaotic and often deadly, while there was a widespread institutional failure to ensure that their needs - for basic necessities, for legal and political rights - were met. To stop there, however, risks giving the false impression that the crisis was a problem from elsewhere that landed unexpectedly on European shores.

This impression is false on two counts. First, Europe has played a key role, historically, in the shaping of a world where power and wealth are unequally distributed, and European powers continue to pursue military and arms trading policies that have caused or contributed to the conflicts and instability from which many people flee. Second, the crisis of 2015 was a direct effect of the complex and often violent system of policing immigration from outside the EU that has been constructed in the last few decades.

In short, this has involved the EU and its members signing treaties with countries outside its borders to control immigration on its behalf; an increasingly militarised frontier at the geographical edges of the EU; and an internal system for regulating the movement of asylum seekers that aims to force them to stay in the first EU country they enter. This, cumulatively, had the effect of forcing desperate people to take narrower and more dangerous routes by land and sea, while the prioritising of border control over safe and dignified reception conditions compounded the disaster. How well, really, did media organisations explain all this to their audiences?

The effect, all too often, was to frame these newly arrived people as others; people from "over there", who had little to do with Europe itself and were strangers, antagonistic even, to its traditions and culture. This was true at times, of both well-meaning and hostile media coverage. A sympathetic portrayal of the displaced might focus on some of those images and stories that matched stereotypes of innocence and vulnerability: children, women, families; the vulnerable, the sick, the elderly.

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Negative coverage, meanwhile, might focus more on the men, the able-bodied, nameless and sometimes faceless people massed at fences or gates. Or people from particular countries would be focused on to suit a political agenda. The Sun, one of Britain's most widely read newspapers, for example, led with a picture of Alan Kurdi on its front page in September 2015, telling its readers that the refugee crisis was a matter of life and death, and that the immediate action required was further British military intervention in Syria. A few weeks later it gave another refugee boat story the front page, but in contrast to the earlier one the language was about "illegals" who were seeking a "back door". This time, the refugees were from Iraq, and they had landed on the territory of a British air force base in Cyprus, which legally made them the responsibility of the UK.

The fragmented and contradictory media coverage of the crisis left room for questions to go unanswered and myths to circulate: who are these people and what do they want from us? Why don't they stop in the first safe country they reach? Why don't the men stay behind and fight? How can we make room for everyone? Are they bringing their problems to our shores? Do they threaten our culture and values? The problem is made worse by those media outlets that have an active desire to stoke hostility and misunderstanding.

One of the first people I met in the course of my reporting was Azad, a young Kurdish man from northern Syria, in a hastily constructed refugee camp in Bulgaria at the end of 2013. At the time, the inability of Bulgarian and EU authorities to adequately prepare for the arrival of a few thousand people - the camp, at Harmanli in southern Bulgaria, marked the first time Médecins sans Frontières had ever set up emergency medical facilities within Europe - seemed like an unusual development. Everyone was new to this situation, and the camp's inhabitants, largely Syrians who had fled the war there but decided that Syria's neighbouring countries could not offer them the security they needed, were shocked at what they found. Several of them told me this couldn't possibly be the real Europe, and that they would continue moving until they found it. Azad was friendly and wanted to know lots about where I came from, London, and to find out what he could about the other countries in Europe, and where people like him might find a place to settle.

I went back to meet Azad several times over the next two years, as he and his family made their way across Bulgaria, and then central Europe, to Germany. During that time, the backlash against refugees grew stronger, a fact Azad was keenly aware of. In Sofia, in the spring of 2014, he pointed out places in the city centre where homeless Syrians had been attacked by street gangs. Later that year, in eastern Germany, we walked through a town where lampposts were festooned with posters for a far-right political party.

An Afghan refugee, Hassan, who collapsed after landing with his family near Skala, Lesbos, July 2015. Photograph: Jillian Edelstein

By the autumn of 2015, Azad and his family were settled in Germany's Ruhr area, and he was much warier of me than he had been in our early meetings. He could see that hostility ran alongside the curiosity and welcome that had greeted the new arrivals to Europe; and he knew how giving too many details away to journalists could threaten what stability people in his situation had managed to find. Within a few months, a series of events - the Islamic State attack in Paris in November 2015, the robberies and sexual assaults in Cologne that New Year's Eve - had provided the excuse for some media outlets to tie well-worn stereotypes about savage, dark foreigners and their alleged threat to white European purity to the refugees of today.

The most brazen of these claims - such as the Polish magazine wSieci, which featured a white woman draped in the EU flag being groped at by the arms of dark-skinned men, under the headline The Islamic Rape of Europe - directly echoed the Nazi and fascist propaganda of Europe's 20th century. But racist stereotyping was present in more liberal outlets too. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, in its coverage of the Cologne attacks, prominently featured an illustration of a woman's legs silhouetted in white, with the space in between taken up by a black arm and hand. Racism is buried so deep in European history that at times like these it can remain unspoken yet still make its presence clear.

Now, several years on from the peak of the refugee crisis, we are faced with a series of uncomfortable facts. The EU has tried to restore and strengthen the border system that existed before 2015 by extending migration control deep into Africa and Asia. The human rights of the people this affects, not least the many migrants trapped in horrendous conditions in Libya, are taking a back seat. Far right and nationalist movements have made electoral gains in many countries within the EU, and they have done this partly by promising to crack down on migration, to punish refugees for daring to ask for shelter from disasters that Europe was all too often the midwife to. Politicians of the centre are being pulled to the right by these developments, and a dangerous narrative threatens to push out all others: that European culture and identity are threatened by intrusions from outside. If we come to view culture in this way - as something fixed and tightly bounded by the ideologies of race and religion, or as a means for wealthy parts of the world to defend their privilege - then we are headed for further, greater disasters.

The irony is that you can only believe in this vision if you ignore not only Europe's history, but its present too. Movement, exchange, new connections, the making and remaking of tradition - these things are happening all around us, and already involve people who have been drawn here from other parts of the world by ties not just of conflict but of economics, history, language and technology. By the same token, displacement is not just a feature of the lives of people from elsewhere in the world; it's been a major and recent part of Europe's history too. And what has kept people alive, what has preserved traditions and allowed people to build identities and realise their potential, is solidarity: the desire to defend one another and work towards common goals.

If there is a failure to recognise this, then the way people are represented by our media and cultural institutions has to be at fault, and setting this right is an urgent challenge. This isn't only in terms of how people are represented and when, but who gets to participate in the decision-making; who gets to speak with authority, or with political intent, or with a collective voice rather than simply as an individual.

All too often, the voices of refugees and other marginalised people are reduced to pure testimony, which is then interpreted and contextualised on their behalf. One thing that constantly surprised me about the reporting on refugees in Europe, for instance, was how little we heard from journalists who had connections to already settled diaspora communities. Immigration from Africa, Asia or the Middle East is hardly new to Europe, and this seems like a missed opportunity to strengthen bridges we have already built. Though it's never too late.

Any meaningful response to this has to address the question of who gets to tell stories, as well as what kinds of stories are told. The Refugee Journalism Project, a mentoring scheme for displaced journalists, based at London College of Communication - disclosure: I'm on the steering committee, and it is supported by the Guardian Foundation - focuses not only on providing people with a media platform, but helping them develop the skills and contacts necessary for getting jobs.

All too often the second part is forgotten about. But although initiatives like these are encouraging, we also need to rethink the way our media organisations are run: who owns them, who makes the decisions, who does the work. This reminds me of what I heard Fatima, a women's rights activist originally from Nigeria, tell an audience of NGO workers in Italy in 2016: "Don't just come and ask me questions and sell my story or sell my voice; we need a change."

The more those of us who work in media can help develop the connections that already exist between us, the more I think we can break down the idea of irreconcilable conflict over migration. Because, really, there is no "over there" - just where we are.

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This is adapted from an essay in Lost in Media: Migrant Perspectives and the Public Sphere (Valiz), a project of the European Cultural Foundation edited by Ismail Einashe and Thomas Roueché

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How the media contributed to the migrant crisis

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Disaster reporting plays to set ideas about people from 'over there'. By Daniel Trilling

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Judith Butler - Gender as Performance.pdf