Riprese di realtà: indicalità ed efficacia sensibile, tra eyewitness video e news / Reality shootings: indexicality and sensorial effectiveness, between eyewitness videos and news

  • Lucio Spaziante
Keywords: audiovisuals, eyewitness video, media, news, indexicality, witnessing, semiotics

Abstract

In a recording culture that constantly documents the everyday reality through audiovisual materials, a particular type of amateur videos, called eyewitness videos (EV), emerges in crisis situations such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks. The EVs are regularly inserted into the tv news flux as they convey, at the same time, the objectivity effect of a prosthesis and the emotional and testimonial taking charge of those who personally participate in the event. EVs are attributed a value of thereness deriving from their - presumed - self-evidence that provides viewers with the experience of being able to “touch” closely the event. Here it is evoked a form of naive indexicality which, through an impression of immediacy, de-problematizes that complex structural relationship between reality and its reproduction, contained in the media ontology. The analysis covered in this article highlights how that set, consisting of a promise of objectivity, absence of mediation and information surplus provided by the news, hides the effective technical - sound and visual - manipulation included in these materials. It’s a sub-code that produces a sort of amateur aesthetic of crisis, useful to be applied in other media contexts. This logic of sensorial effectiveness that leads to the search for subjective experiential effects, also determines the modification of the conventions related to the journalistic function of documentation. Rather than enriching a witnessing function, the rhetoric comprised in these media processes shows, rather, an impoverishment of the critical and informative role of the media.

References

ANDÉN-PAPADOPOULOS, Kari (2014), «Citizen Camera-Witnessing: Embodied Political Dissent in the Age Of ‘Mediated Mass Self-Communication’», in New Media & Society, n. 16 (5), pp. 753-769.

ANDÉN-PAPADOPOULOS, Kari, PANTTI, Mervi (2011), Amateur Images and Global News, Intellect, Bristol, Chicago.

BELAIR-GAGNON, Valerie (2015), Social Media at BBC News the Re-Making of Crisis Reporting, Routledge, New York, Abingdon.

CHOULIARAKI, Lilie (2009), Journalism and the visual politics of war and conflict, in ALLAN Stuart, (a cura di) Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, Routledge, London, UK, pp. 520-533.

CHOULIARAKI, Lilie (2010), «Ordinary witnessing in post-television news: towards a new moral imagination», in Critical Discourse Studies, n. 7 (4), pp. 305-319.

COTTLE, Simon (2009), «Global Crises in the News: Staging New Wars, Disasters, and Climate Change», in International Journal of Communication, n. 3, pp. 494-516.

DEMARIA, Cristina (2012), Il trauma, l’archivio, il testimone, Bononia University Press, Bologna.

DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges and REPENSEK Thomas (1984), «The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)», in October, n. 29, pp. 63-81.

DOANE Mary Ann (2007), «The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity», in Differences, n. 18 (1), pp. 128-152.

DUSI, Nicola (2015), Contromisure. Trasposizioni e intermedialità, Mimesis, Milano.

ELLIS, John (2000), Seeing Things: Television in The Age of Uncertainty, L.B. Tauris, London.

ELLIS, John (2009), «What are we expected to feel? Witness, textuality and the audiovisual», in Screen, n. 50 (1), pp. 67-76.

ELSAESSER, Thomas (2013), Digital Cinema: Convergence or Contradiction?, in VERNALLIS Carol, HERZOG Amy, and RICHARDSON John, a cura di, The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 13-44.

EUGENI, Ruggero (2012), «First person shot. New Forms of Subjectivity between Cinema and Intermedia Networks», in Anàlisi: quaderns de comunicació i cultura, Núm. Monogràfic Audiovisual 2.0, pp. 19-31.

EUGENI, Ruggero (2015), La condizione postmediale. Media, linguaggi e narrazioni, La Scuola, Brescia.

FEATHERSTONE, Mike (2009), «Ubiquitous Media: An Introduction», in Theory Culture Society, n. 26 (2-3), pp. 1-22.

FELMAN, Shoshana, LAUB, Dori (1992), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Routledge, New York, London.

FONTANILLE, Jacques (2004), Figure del corpo: per una semiotica dell’impronta, Meltemi, Roma.

FROSH, Paul, PINCHEVSKI, Amit (2009), a cura di, Media Witnessing. Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

FROSH, Paul, PINCHEVSKI, Amit (2014) «Media witnessing and the ripeness of time», in Cultural Studies, n. 28 (4), pp. 594-610.

FUMAGALLI, Armando (1995), Il reale nel linguaggio: indicalità e realismo nella semiotica di Peirce, Vita e Pensiero, Milano.

FUMAGALLI, Armando (2006), “Il problema dell’indicalità in semiotica”, in RAYNAUD, S. (a cura di), Io, tu, qui, ora. Quale semantica per gli indicali?, Guerini & Associati, Milano, pp. 53-82.

LEONE, Massimo (2014), a cura di, «Immagini efficaci», in Lexia, n. 17-18.

LEVI-STRAUSS, Claude (1958), Anthropologie Structurale I, Plon, Paris, (Antropologia strutturale, trad. di Paolo Caruso, Il Saggiatore, Milano 1998).

MARRONE, Gianfranco (2014), «Gustare con gli occhi: l’enunciazione in Masterchef», in Lexia, n. 17-18, pp. 319-339.

MONTANI, Pietro (2010), L’immaginazione intermediale. Perlustrare, rifigurare, testimoniare il mondo visibile, Laterza, Roma-Bari.

MORTENSEN, Mette (2015), Journalism and Eyewitness Images. Digital Media, Participation, and Conflict, Routledge, New York, Abingdon.

PETERS, Chris, ALLAN, Stuart (2016), «Everyday imagery: Users’reflections on smartphone cameras and communication», in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, pp. 1-17, (consultato il 09/12/ 2016).

PETERS, John Durham (2001), «Witnessing», in Media, Culture and Society, n. 23 (6), pp. 707-23.

PISANTY, Valentina (2014), «Per una semiotica della testimonianza», in Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio/SFL, pp. 323-336.

POGLIANO, Andrea (2015), «Iconic Photographs in the Newsroom: An Ethnography of Visual News-making in Italy and France», in Sociologica, n. 1, pp. 1-49.

ROBISON, David J., ROBINSON, Wendy (2006), Tsunami Mobilizations: Considering the Role of Mobile and Digital Communication Devices, Citizen Journalism, and the Mass Media, in KAVOORI, (a cura di), ARCENEAUX, Noah, (eds.), The Cell Phone Reader: Essays in Social Transformation, Peter Lang Publishing, New York, pp. 85-103.

SABATINI, Francesco, COLETTI, Vittorio (2003) Il Sabatini Coletti: dizionario della lingua italiana, Rizzoli Larousse, Milano.

SJØVAAG, Helle, BRIDGE, John (2010) Amateur Images in the Professional News Stream, in GRIPSRUD, Jostein (a cura di) Relocating Television. Television in the Digital Context, Routledge, London, pp. 101-112.

SJØVAAG, Helle (2011) Amateur Images and Journalistic Authority in ANDÉN-PAPADOPOULOS Kari, PANTTI Mervi, (a cura di), Amateur Images and Global News, Intellect, Bristol, Chicago, pp. 79-95.

SPAYD, Liz (2016), «Why’d You Do That? Running a Photo of a Killer on the Home Page », in The New York Times, 19/12/2016 (consultato il 13/12/2017).

TraMe (2013), a cura di, «Politiche della memoria. Uno sguardo semiotico», in Versus, n. 116.

VERNALLIS, Carol (2013), Unruly Media YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema, Oxford University Press, New York.

VIOLI, Patrizia (2014), Paesaggi della memoria: il trauma, lo spazio, la storia, Bompiani, Milano.

VOLLI, Ugo (2014), «Leggere le immagini?», in Lexia, n. 17-18, pp. 17-40.

ZELIZER, Barbie (2007), «On ‘Having Been There’: ‘Eyewitnessing’ as a Journalistic Key Word», in Critical Studies in Media Communication, n. 24 (5), pp. 408-428.

ZELIZER, Barbie (2010), About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, Oxford University Press, New York.

How to Cite
Spaziante, L. (1) “Riprese di realtà: indicalità ed efficacia sensibile, tra eyewitness video e news / Reality shootings: indexicality and sensorial effectiveness, between eyewitness videos and news”, Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio, 00. Available at: http://160.97.104.70/index.php/rifl/article/view/458 (Accessed: 29March2024).