Comments on: Saddam Hussain Video: We too were there

By: Judith

Judith — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 12:10:00 +0000

This is a very interesting thread. I’ve been thinking about how some of the central concepts in the evolving canon of research on cellphone use might be used to interpret the significance of the execution video. Three concepts in particular run throughout the canon and serve as shorthand for perceptions of how cellphone uses affect space, time, culture, social relations: anytime, anywhere, perpetual contact and absent presence. The first two have received a lot of ink. The latter, less... but it is the one I think is most useful for understanding the overlap of visuality and aurality in cellphone uses now. The phrase describes when non-users encounter a cellphone user. We are present but simultaneously rendered absent (Gergen in Katz & Aakhus 2002: 227). As a stranger, not a friend, to the security guard who made the video, I did not feel a sense of coming into a relationship with the maker when I viewed the video. Instead, I felt a kind of embarrassment akin to witnessing, through overhearing, a too-intimate phone conversation. Absent presence is also used in postcolonial studies to describe the lack of attention paid to minority populations by a majority population, whose culture is hegemonic. Both definitions of absent presence carry a sense of witnessing without being seen and a sense of perpetually encountering experiences that are not our own, via speech, words, and images produced by others.

By: CC

CC — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 04:34:00 +0000

Some Latin American Cynicism

Many questions came to my mind when this cellphone video hit the cyber-waves, most of them tending toward the suspicious (I blame my Latin American side for that). First I wondered about security at the event and then I began to think it strange that there was not more outcry from the U.S. It seemed, to me, a bit too neat.
The re-storying of the event and the distraction from critics who decried this hanging, not just for being on a holy day, but for eliminating a key informant for the horrors of the chemical warfare sponsored by the U.S. in the region.
How convenient, I thought, to mask, through a ghastly side show, the workings of well puppeteers for lack of a better term. It seems the equivalent of the way propaganda experts flood airwaves and cyber-waves with stories that will facilitate general amnesia. I would venture to call it a species of visual anaesthetic!

By: nOtoften

nOtoften — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 18:17:00 +0000

Great post Rob. I have been thinking alot about the most recent events in the ‘post Saddam era.’

The video clip of Saddam’s hanging really has changed the way that we experience political events. It has also changed the way sovereignty operates. Now that internet users can see every grizzly detail of Saddam’s death, it leaves me with a bit of an strange feeling. Does this form of publicized hanging change perceptions of human dignity and justice in contemporary politics? Is Saddam, as one of the most famous dictators of all time, somehow being denied a dignified death through the popular access to these images? Why would I even think about a dignified death for a dictator?

What exactly does the ‘visual’ tell us here, and are we actually experiencing and witnessing something new? Yes, cell-phones and new mobile cameras have allowed new access to event. Saddam’s hanging (and your post) makes me think about what transformations in technology are revealing for the possibility of dignified ways of life. Quite obviously, there has always been ways to ‘experience the moment.’ However, we must find ways to understand how new technologies of the image are transforming experiences of life, love and politics at an alarmingly fast pace.

By: anne

anne — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 17:06:00 +0000