Page 78 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

The Fate of the Iconic Sign: Taser Video 69

assumption is that prisoners are not persons.‖[Dyan, pg. 90]. It is unknown
whether the taser-play represented on videos in YouTube circulation will have
a dulling effect on their audience, normalizing a tool of law enforcement that
can also be used as an instrument of torture [Regali] [Miller i], or whether a
younger generation of participants in the legal system will bring new literacies
to bear. Habits from their own use of photography and, most especially, their
experiences editing it with widely available digital tools, may cause younger
people to be able to think more critically about what they are seeing. Will they
be more able to see the doubleness of iconic pictures – that they look like what
we see but that they also have mediated effects and are not just slices of
―reality‖? And will they be able to maintain this under the viewing pressures
of 29.5 frames a second?
Viewers of weaponized video will need moral imagination. They will
have to begin by seeing that the person tased is a human being with rights.
They will have to refuse the pleasures of the images of control and mastery
over that person by an officer of the law enough to evaluate those same
pictures in the context of other evidence in the case. Supervisors reviewing the
Taser recordings to monitor their own operations will face the same sorts of
questions, only the recordings will be even more normalized because they are
a part of normal institutional practices. Will they pay attention? First, video
recording ought to be mandatory on every stun gun unit sold. Users should
know that their decision to deploy might be monitored and subject to review
by some external authority. Supervisors should be required to keep detailed
data on Taser deployment by officers and correctional staff working under
them. Without surveillance, it is too easy to use impulsively. Anecdotal
evidence suggests stun guns are deployed against people who lack political
power in circumstances where officers are not really in danger. So we need to
have more pictures generated, not fewer. And second, we need to be sure that
everyone connected with the justice system is media literate – and the broader
population as well.

CONCLUSION

We need the resources of pictures that have iconic relationships to reality
for witnessing and documenting and for entertainment and aesthetic pleasure.
We also need to resist their simple persuasions so that we can understand them
as a communication in a context that is material, pertaining to how it is made,
and social. While there is promise in a younger generation of sophisticated