ABSTRACT
‘Eyewitness’ is an inescapable keyword in the contemporary media landscape. Formats such as ‘Eyewitness News’, ‘Eyewitness reports’, ‘Eyewitness photography’, ‘Eyewitness accounts’, ‘Eyewitness sport’, ‘youwitnessnews’, and ‘Citizen eyewitness’ testify to the eager embrace of this concept, particularly in the realms of nonfiction genres such as news, documentary, report-age, and sports. Witnessing 1 may, following John Durham Peters’ seminal article ‘Witnessing’, stand for ‘all three points of a basic communication triangle’: message, sender, and recipient (2001, 709). Accordingly, it is ‘a strange but intelligible sentence to say: the witness (speech-act) of the witness (person) was witnessed (by an audience)’ (2001, 709); that is, first-hand eyewitnesses perform the act of witnessing specific events, and by so doing situate media audiences as second-hand witnesses. Media technology for storing evidence is also accorded the status of witness; for instance, the legal vocabulary refers to the ‘mechanical witness’ of a camera or tape recorder. In sum, the act of witnessing is performed ‘in, by and through the media’ (Frosh and Pinchevski 2009b, 1), and the notion of the ‘witness’ may refer to media content, sources of information, media technologies, media users, and media produsers (Bruns 2008).
