Brian Fitzgerald is Communications Manager for Greenpeace International – below he shares his reflections on the power of video to prod power and mobilise action. Naturally, his views do not represent the views of WITNESS (but we think they’re pretty interesting).
I remember the first time I saw video of whales being hunted. It was on the family television set — one of those old behemoths set into a piece of wooden furniture with gold-threaded cloth over the speakers, I guess in 1972 or 73. It was the kiss-off story, and Walter Cronkite commented on it with the only editorializing that hardened anchorman ever allowed himself, which was the inflection and tone he put on his signature goodbye: “And that’s the way it is…”
The tone, the eyebrows, and the pause he put around the phrase that night might as well have said “what is the matter with us as a species?” He couldn’t help it — the footage we’d just watched was an astounding piece of political activism, and his was the only reaction possible. It took something that was normally far from human view, the killing of whales, and it brought it into our living rooms. And it showed a conflict — a pair of Greenpeace activists in a tiny rubber boat, putting themselves between the harpoon and the whale — and challenged the viewer to choose a side. The implicit frame around that conflict was that one party was right, and the other was wrong, and you had to make a choice: Who are you with — the guy behind the harpoon, or those folks in the boat? I knew where I stood. So did enough people that a global movement to save the whale was born out of those images.
When I think about video as an activist tool, I think about a Quaker concept called “bearing witness.” It’s kind of a quirky concept, but here’s how it breaks down. If you witness a crime, you bear a moral responsibility. You can choose to act against the crime, you can choose not to. But if you’ve seen it and do nothing, you carry part of the burden of responsibility.
But in the Quaker concept, by inviting others to bear witness with you to a crime, you increase the likelihood that the collective weight of human attention will lead to action. Enough people witness a crime, sooner or later enough people will act to stop it.
And that, to me, is what video activism is all about — whether it’s via the medium of documentary film, television, or the internet. It’s about seizing attention, exposing a choice, and putting enough people in front of that choice that the world turns.
Back in the days when Greenpeace had to get video out via television, we had to play by the rules of what the conventional media considered worthy of broadcast. We gave them conflict. We gave them arrests. We gave them hijinks and theatre. Today, we have to play by the rules of what the internet audience considers worthy of their attention. I think it’s safe to say those are demonstrably different things. Once, our competitors for moral attention were wars and famine. Today, it’s LOL Catz and the history of dance.
And, increasingly, it’s advertising.
When we decided to make an issue of deforestation in Indonesia, we knew that one of the biggest problems was ancient rainforests getting mown down to plant oil palms, from which comes one of modern consumer society’s bulk products: palm oil. It ends up in everything from ice cream to hand cream. When we looked at who the major consumers were, the Anglo-Dutch corporation Unilever leapt to the fore. They are one of the largest purchaser of palm oil in the world, if not the largest, and thus a major contributor to deforestation.
Now, if we want to tell Unilever how important forests are to the climate, we need their attention. If we want them to know that 20% of the world’s CO2 emissions come from deforestation, we can say that in a report, we can say that in a news item, we can say that in a thousand ways that won’t make the company feel any burden of responsibility for that fact, or any impulse to change. In fact, in the case of Unilever we did do that, in a series of letters and meetings. Yawns. Polite noises. No action.
But when we say it to their customer base in the language of their brand and their own ads, that’s something different.
We chose to say it in a video: a spoof of an award-winning ad that Unilever had created for its line of Dove beauty products. We wanted to reach Dove’s customer base, so why not simply piggy back on all the focus groups, all the market research, all the creativity that had gone into creating an ad for their product, and use that to expose the responsibility of their brand for deforestation? As a piece of entertainment, Dove had created a video ad which pit their product against the beauty industry, taking a moral high ground against those soulless corporate hucksters. It was a masterpiece of soulless corporate hucksterism. But it appealed to people who cared about human values, about the future, and about right and wrong: exactly the folks we wanted to talk to about Dove’s role in deforestation.
Unilever knows the power of bearing witness — though they think of it in terms of brand equity erosion and loss of market share. But it’s all part of the same force that Greenpeace and other activist groups have harnessed for decades: put people in front of the screen, show them an atrocity, and sooner or later someone is going to stand up, walk out, and do something. Put enough people in front of that screen, and pretty soon you’ve got a crowd. Then a mob. Then a movement. It’s simply something about the way that human nature responds to moving pictures.