{"id":200252,"date":"2021-03-11T22:32:23","date_gmt":"2021-03-11T19:32:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/myanmars-searing-smartphone-images-flood-a-watching-world\/"},"modified":"2021-03-11T22:32:23","modified_gmt":"2021-03-11T19:32:23","slug":"myanmars-searing-smartphone-images-flood-a-watching-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/myanmars-searing-smartphone-images-flood-a-watching-world\/","title":{"rendered":"#Myanmar\u2019s searing smartphone images flood a watching world"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Myanmar\u2019s searing smartphone images flood a watching world<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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The images ricochet across the planet, as so many do in this dizzying era of film it, upload it, tell it to the world: scenes from a protest-turned-government crackdown, captured at ground level by smartphone users on the streets of Myanmar.<\/p>\n

Images shot across barricades and furtively through windows. From behind bushes and through smudged car windshields. Horizontal video. Vertical video. Video captured by people running toward chaos and away from it. People shouting. People helping. People demanding.<\/p>\n

People dying.<\/p>\n

The world is watching violent events unfold in Myanmar for many reasons, but perhaps one above all: because it can.<\/p>\n

It is a dynamic completely unlike the uprising that spread through the Southeast Asian nation in the pre-internet, pre-smartphone summer of 1988. Then, when student-led demonstrations were violently put down by the government, cementing Myanmar\u2019s global notoriety as an isolated, repressive state, it took months, even years, for the outside world to understand the full story of what had happ<\/a>ened.<\/p>\n

This time around, the imagery is\u00a0plentiful and unsettling.\u00a0<\/a>Filmed by participants on the ground and uploaded, sometimes immedia<\/a>tely, the protests and crackdowns are reaching millions of handheld devices around the planet, also almost immediately.<\/p>\n

\"Anti-coup
Anti-coup protesters discharge fire extinguishers to counter the impact of the tear gas fired by police during a demonstration in Mandalay, Myanmar March 7, 2021. <\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s a vivid example of a technological truism in an age when capturing images has become utterly democratized: If you can glimpse it up close, you\u2019re more likely to pay attention.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know the old adage that a picture speaks a thousand words. It makes you feel like, `This is happening, this is true,\u2019\u201d says\u00a0Kareem El Damanhoury,<\/a>\u00a0a media scholar at the University of Denver who is writing a book about visuals in times of conflict.<\/p>\n

In Myanmar today, he says, \u201cThe images are not just complementing what\u2019s happening. Over time they become defining of the conflict itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

As of Wednesday, more than 60 people were dead from the government crackdown on mass protests in Myanmar after a coup early last month. Nearly 2,000 are estimated to be imprisoned and\u00a0media outlets are being targeted.<\/a>\u00a0Among those held: Thein Zaw, an Associated Press journalist taken into custody in a chokehold by authorities while doing his job 10 days ago \u2014 an arrest also\u00a0captured on video<\/a>\u00a0and widely shared.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe video is extremely disturbing,\u201d UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said last week of footage chronicling attacks on journalists \u2014 footage captured in some cases by non-professional, non-media sources.<\/p>\n

The ability of on-the-ground imagery from amateurs to define a conflict, through still photos and particularly video, has been accelerating for more than a decade.<\/p>\n

Many media scholars cite the 2009\u00a0election protests in Iran<\/a>\u00a0and the chronicling of government violence there, particularly the shooting death of a young musician named\u00a0Neda Agha-Soltan,<\/a>\u00a0as an inflection point.<\/p>\n

That came four years after the dawn of YouTube and two years after Apple introduced the iPhone, which ushered in a trio of watershed moments: Amateur video became easily shareable, smartphones with decent-quality video and instant uploads became affordable and many humans suddenly always had cameras in their pockets.<\/p>\n

\"Anti-coup
Anti-coup protesters with makeshift shields take positions in Mandalay, Myanmar. <\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The decade that followed brought many opportunities for democratized, phone-shot imagery \u2014 from the 2011\u00a0Arab Spring<\/a>\u00a0to the Hong Kong protests of 2014 and the increasing government crackdown against them in\u00a0ensuing years.<\/a><\/p>\n

Last year in the United States, the\u00a0killing of George Floyd<\/a>\u00a0at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer was captured on nearly nine minutes of anguished video \u2014 only the latest imagery of police violence against Black Americans to command worldwide attention.<\/p>\n

Floyd\u2019s death set off a summer of anti-racism protests and law-enforcement responses, both of which sometimes turned violent \u2014 and were chronicled by millions of minutes of shared on-the-ground video, which became central to Americans\u2019 understanding of the events. Same story with\u00a0amateur video shot by participants in the siege of the US Capitol<\/a>\u00a0in January, which has been used to understand the events, to propagandize them and to prosecute suspected insurrectionists.<\/p>\n

In the case of Myanmar, the sheer amount and quality of the amateur video is particularly striking when contrasted with \u201c8.8.88\u201d \u2014 the August 1988 pro-democracy uprising against dictator Ne Win that produced a military coup the following month in the nation then known as Burma.<\/p>\n

Imagery from those days was relatively scant and communications from within the country \u2014 visual and otherwise \u2014 were vigorously muzzled. Any iconic images came from, or were amplified by, established news<\/a> outlets. There was no internet yet, no shared video or social platforms to host it. And then much of the world forgot about Myanmar for\u00a0nearly a generation.<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s different this time. Though YouTube has\u00a0taken down some Myanmar military channels<\/a>\u00a0for violating its terms of service, citizen video is plentiful. And representatives of governmental bodies from the United States to the United Nations have cited the video as a muscular reminder of the power of the image to impact perception and, possibly, policy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was struck by the vibrancy of the images I have seen \u2014 the color, the kinetic energy in them, which seemed pretty distinctive,\u201d says Mitchell Stephens, a New York University professor and author of\u00a0\u201cThe Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

The imagery out of Myanmar, he says, \u201cbrings back bad memories of all the failed democracy protests we\u2019ve had in recent decades around the world. I can\u2019t help thinking of the Arab Spring, which was such an immense disappointment and tragedy, or Tiananmen Square.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Protesters
Protesters wearing helmet and gas mask take positions behind a makeshift barricade as armed riot policemen gather in Yangon, Myanmar. <\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The difference, of course, is that imagery from the\u00a01989 Chinese government crackdown<\/a>\u00a0on democracy protesters was, in an era of fax machines, also almost exclusively disseminated by professional media outlets until they were restricted or expelled. The most-remembered image of that period, the photo of a lone man confronting a column of tanks just off the square, was captured by four news photographers with professional cameras from high-altitude balconies.<\/p>\n

Same story with much of the visuals that chronicled global unrest over the past 50 years. The most iconic images of the Vietnam War \u2014 the ones that helped change the US government\u2019s commitment to it, such as AP photographer\u00a0Nick Ut\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0photo of\u00a0Kim Phuc<\/a>\u00a0running down a street, naked and\u00a0burned by a South Vietnamese napalm attack<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 came from professional journalists. After all, they were the ones who had the infrastructure and support to transmit their images to the wider world.<\/p>\n

Now pretty much everyone has that infrastructure in their pockets. But does that mean the global attention will last? If precedent is any indication, global news consumers in a landscape weighed down by a glut of imagery may surrender to short attention spans \u2014 even if the scenes coming out of Myanmar exhort them to do otherwise.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m very hesitant about whether and how the democratization of image(s) can put pressure on outside forces,\u201d says\u00a0Wei-Ting Yen,<\/a>\u00a0who teaches Asian politics at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt does provide a closer-to-reality kind of understanding,\u201d she says. But beyond that? Perhaps not so much.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Myanmar, the first few days it was amazing and then you saw the cracking down, which was horrifying,\u201d Yen says. \u201cBut as it goes on, people have a short memory. They forget and the next time they see the image \u2014 people who don\u2019t understand what\u2019s going on \u2014 they say, `Oh, this is what\u2019s happening,\u2019 and they move on.\u201d\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Myanmar\u2019s searing smartphone images flood a watching world” The images ricochet across the planet, as so many do in this dizzying era of film it, upload it, tell it to the world: scenes from a protest-turned-government crackdown, captured at ground level by smartphone users on the streets of Myanmar. Images shot across barricades and furtively…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":200253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/myanmar-smartphone-images-001.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[97194,93113,73823,70424,1621,72110,4965],"class_list":["post-200252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-3-11-21","tag-coups","tag-human-rights","tag-myanmar","tag-protests","tag-smartphones","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}