Cell phone videos of war let Internet viewers hear the rockets, feel the terror
July 28, 2006
By Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Julien created BloggingBeirut.com 18 months ago as a romantic pursuit -- a way to share the beauty of his native Lebanon with a woman he met in graduate school in New York. That relationship dissolved, but last week BloggingBeirut was getting 400,000 hits a day after Julien, who asked that his last name not be published, posted video shot on cell phones of his beloved hometown now ravaged by war.
In a town in northern Israel last week, 16-year-old Guy Naveh posted footage on the video-sharing site YouTube.com that he shot with a digital camera from the balcony of his family's apartment. He wanted friends in other parts of Israel and relatives in the United States to sense the panic people feel when an air raid siren blows. More than 9,000 people have seen Naveh's video, including a friend of his who wanted to shoot a video, too, Naveh wrote in an e-mail, "but his mother don't want him to go outside."
"When you watch a video you can almost feel what the camera man did," Naveh wrote. "And when you read a text ... well ... you need to use your imagination."
Video-sharing technology is revolutionizing how people far from the battlefield understand the latest Middle East war. Experts predict that the edgy, personalized clips being passed around worldwide soon will influence traditional broadcast news by infusing it with the passion of citizen journalists, who are reporting as rockets crash onto their neighborhoods.
From popular video-sharing sites like YouTube to amateur blogs floating in the Internet ether, viewers are seeing footage shot by the shaky hand of someone living where the bombs are falling in Israel and Lebanon -- and they are feeling their fear. This type of street-level, first-person footage, or guerrilla filmmaking, has been seen less from citizens of Iraq or Afghanistan, experts said, because the technology infrastructure and power supply is inferior to that in the more prosperous Israel and Lebanon.
Among the examples of cinema verite on sharing sites are more slickly produced, politically partisan pieces. They're often a pastiche of widely distributed news photographs or video clips set over background music. Images of injured children are a staple.
But partisanship is not what Mohammad Soubra, a 27-year-old Lebanon native who grew up in the shadow of Israel's 1982 invasion, had in mind when he made his first posting to YouTube last week.
"I am not taking sides, left or right, in this war, I just want people to see what war does to people," said Soubra, who now lives in the Netherlands. He posted a 50-second video to YouTube last week, after soliciting submissions from friends back home, "so people can understand what a war is like."
Since then, more than 300,000 people have viewed the video Soubra's friend shot from the balcony of an east Beirut apartment. It consists of the sounds and accompanying flash of bombs exploding several miles away. Soubra remembered those sounds and sights from his childhood. His parents and brother still live in Lebanon.
"You don't have to just post a photo of a burned child to show the impact of war," Soubra said. "I want people to see another impact of war. How you can't sleep at night because bombs are going off outside. I wanted people to see this and debate it." Soubra is particularly aware of what he doesn't see on
TV.
"There is a (TV journalist) standing on a hill with an exploded building behind them far away. They are reporting without passion," he said. "They are not living there."
Last week, Jaron Gilinsky headed to Haifa to film a news feature for Current TV. The year-old San Francisco network is largely programmed on user-created video content that's geared to 18- to 34-year-olds. A year ago, Gilinsky began submitting videos as "a total stranger," said a network official, and has worked his way up to a regular correspondent.
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| Jaron Gilinsky, in his "Dodging Katyushas" video, shows a rocket attack on a rail depot in Haifa, and his reaction to a close call. Photo courtesy of www.current.tv |
As Gilinsky was interviewing the official of a rail depot where a rocket blast killed eight people days earlier there, another rocket landed just outside the depot.
Cameras still rolling, Gilinsky and depot employees hurried to a nearby bomb shelter. Just as they were sealing themselves inside, another rocket hit the depot. Nobody was hurt.
As the lights went back on inside the shelter, Gilinsky's eyes nervously darted around the room. He turned toward the camera and said, "I'm freaking out right now. This is crazy. Crazy. I'm sweating. I'm dripping with sweat."
He returned to the site of his bomb-shortened interview. "It landed exactly where we were filming a minute ago. A minute ago," Gilinsky said. "We were standing there a minute ago."
It was a moment of edgy on-air realism rarely seen on the major networks.
Current TV's young audience appreciates this unedited approach, said supervising producer Laura Ling. "They are exposed to so much reality TV that news doesn't seem real to them any more. We're just trying to peel back the layers.
"And with Jaron's story, we just kind of let it unfold," she said.
Former CNN correspondent and bureau chief Rebecca MacKinnon said, "Professional camera crews are rarely there when a bomb goes off or a rocket lands. They usually show up afterwards. And the reporters (from network news crews) are trained professionals. They're usually not from the towns they're covering. They're trying to cover the story objectively.
"But with these videos, the person is showing you what he is filming," said MacKinnon, now a co-founder of Global Voices Online. Run out of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the nonpartisan organization monitors thousands of international bloggers daily in the hope of bringing more local voices to the international media conversation.
"There's a genuineness to their voices," MacKinnon said. "When you see these videos, it makes you say, 'Oh, my God, what would it be like to be that person.' "
But MacKinnon doesn't foresee amateur videographers supplanting traditional journalists. Instead, she sees bloggers and other video posters leading journalists to untold stories in undiscovered -- at least by the media -- corners of the world. Efforts at trying to get more behind-the-lines footage out of Iraq have been hampered, she said, by the country's intermittent power supply and relatively poor technology infrastructure.
"So for that reason, I don't think we'll be seeing a lot of video coming out of Darfur, for example," MacKinnon said. "But this is citizens' media, and we're seeing it take another step into the media ecosystem from the fringe."
As for the credibility of video floating around the Internet, Global Vision offers this advice to journalists on its Web site, www.globalvoicesonline.org:
"Quote from any blog at your own risk, just as you quote from any source at your own risk. And as with any source, anonymous blogs must pass a much higher credibility threshold than blogs whose authors make their identity public and their allegiances clear."
Though he is Israeli, the allegiances of the 16-year-old YouTube poster Naveh may be less related to his nationality and more to the bravado typical of someone his age.
"My goal?" Naveh wrote in response to an e-mailed question. "Maybe just to show people how brave I am for going out recording during bombing."
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/28/MNG2RK79S61.DTL&hw=cell+phone+videos&sn=001&sc=1000