ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how web videos intensify the epistemological and political contradictions inherent in media witnessing. An omnipresent component of contemporary life, video witnesses are ready to record whatever may occur in front of their networked, hand-held devices. Furthermore, in contrast to their ancestors from the 1970s and 1980s, today’s video witnesses can distribute their highly subjective testimonies via ready-made social web services and platforms. These emancipated video witnesses thereby destabilize power relations in the field of witnessing. Having evolved under broadcast conditions, this field has since maintained a dynamic balance between witnesses, mediators and audiences. However, this balance is also marked by an increasing struggle for dominance in the field, which becomes manifest in the current crisis of media credibility. This crisis ultimately works in favour of new mediators that provide the hardware and software infrastructures for, and appropriate, accumulate and exploit, the data generated by these networked forms of ubiquitous witnessing. The current state of media witnessing therefore raises the question of how such an unsettled field can restore the necessary leap of faith to preserve video witnessing as a media and political practice.
