Audience Attitudes towards Eyewitness Footage

The next speakers in our ECREA 2012 panel are Laura Ahva and Maria Hellman, whose interest is in the citizen eyewitnessing of crises. Witnessing has always been a central task of crisis journalism, but citizen-generated content is now increasingly important; citizen eyewitness images are especially central now, and are mediated from the sites of crises to the global audience. The Arab Spring provides a very useful recent example for this.

Professional media and citizen eyewitnessing have become co-dependent on each other, leading perhaps even to a symbiotic relationship or congruence between the two. Audiences use such content to make sense of what is happening in such crisis situations, but this has not yet been sufficiently researched. How do distant audiences (here, in Sweden and Finland) used eyewitness audiovisual news content from Libya and Syria, for example?

Witnessing has become important in two ways. Eyewitnessing results in the publication and circulation of first-hand, subjective, and nonprofessional photography, and audiences are thereby positioned as 'media witnesses' to the same events. Audiences are nonetheless thought to remain detached and disengaged from events which do not directly affect them; how do audiences connect with distant crises through eyewitness content, then?

Audience members attach themselves to, connect with, and get involved with journalistic coverage – this is engagement; at he same time, where this does not take place, disengagement takes place. Engagement may involve at the level of the interpretation of journalistic content, of media use and participation practices by audiences, and of audiences' overall orientation toward society and the world around them.

The project explored this through a series of focus groups with media users in Finland and Sweden, and examined their engagement with (sometimes very graphic) professional and citizen footage from Libya and Syria. Dimensions of trust, violence, journalistic context, and other factors were explored in these focus groups.

Generally, respondents clearly saw differences between these images – they were seen to be of lower quality, lacking context and narrative, and requiring more interpretation; such interpretation asked questions about how genuine images were, highlighted the sense of 'realness' of these images (compared to more produced journalistic content), noted the timeliness and immediacy of these images, and flagged problems with verification of the content.

How audiences interact also depends on whose truth the images claim to represent. Audiences also reflected on their own emotional and physical proximity to these images, and the values, morals, and ethics of this footage.

This reflects engagement through closeness, but also disengagement because of problems with the footage. Making sense of citizen eyewitness images has epistemically, affective, and moral dimensions, then.