5 Strategic Witnessing

The rise of the citizen witness

Advocating Sandra Ristovska has written about the “rise of eyewitness video”^[1] which is a form of recording that she has termed strategic witnessing. Witnessing in media studies is originally attributed to John Durham Peters.^[2] Durham Peters refers to the unreliable witness and sociological discourse to-date that defines the evidence of witnesses as a lesser truth. The value of Ristovska’s term strategic witnessing is the emphasis on the new forms of media that give rise to a new way of performing activism. In discussing the evidence of this witnessing, Ristovska “suggests a conceptual framework through which we can think about evolving forms of media witnessing in the contemporary media moment”.^[3] New forms of recording and evidencing in ‘real time’ present a trusted form of citizen witnessing.

Media studies and social movement studies increasingly recognise the role of citizen witness and citizen journalism forming part of social justice and online witnessing discussed in human rights contexts.^[4] Though these ideas of citizen witnessing are common, the nanosecond archiving of these eyewitness records and the ramifications of this recordkeeping is not explored in the media studies discourse.

Strategic decisions about what to witness, when to witness it and how to share events and protests are part of activist initiatives today. One strength of the animal liberation movement and the reason it is such a powerful activist recordkeeping case study, is their use of online platforms for strategic witnessing. Sharing content on interactive and participatory digital media helps their campaigns gain “visibility and virality”.^[5] By sharing records of their success and legal challenges, allows the broader community to grow actively, share, learn from and record milestones in animal liberation over time.^[6] Records of animal rights groups serve evidentiary purposes and are used to communicate and motivate the movement and broader public to progress animal liberation.

Activists have social media channels and platforms that can counter the popular portrayal of them as criminals, thugs and unreliable witnesses.^[7] Eyewitness nanosecond archiving using networked platforms has created a power shift. In recent times, collecting archives around the impactful movement of Black Lives Matter drove conversations around ‘in time’ recordkeeping by protestors. Documenting and sharing instances of police violence captured on mobile phones represent a transfer of power from the state to the people. This “new world” of documentation has been acknowledged by scholars,^[8] such as

… Howard Zinn’s call for archivists to “compile a whole new world of documentary material” about the lived experiences of marginalized populations and communities.^[9]

It can be debated whether animal liberation activists are classified as ‘marginalised’, they are certainly fringe in their beliefs and condemned by criminalisation as ‘other’ to law-abiding citizens. It is paramount that archivists take an interest in how the state enforces its legitimacy, through what means and how the state inflicts violence upon its citizenry. The documentation describing this violence is vast because so much of it happens within the legal system.^[10]

While Williams and Drake focus on collecting narratives of police violence, the witnesses themselves can be considered archivists. They too can be respected as activist archivists, performing their actions in a nanosecond. Records are

… not ours [as archivists] to use it’s theirs [the activists] … they are online, we don’t have to look far to find them. They have been creating this content, they are very practiced at it as activist archivists, shaped by the UX of these platforms. Videographers in Syria, they archive like in YouTube. How YouTube functions, that’s their archival practice.^[11]

With radical recordkeeping and strategic witnessing comes a degree of risk and the risk of archiving on social platforms. The archival multiverse comprises pluralised narratives in society. This understanding of the multiverse shows a heightened awareness of the need for community autonomy and power in activist recordkeeping and archiving practices. Sue McKemmish was the first to introduce a human “urge to witness”^[12] into the archival literature. Her insights into personal “recordkeeping as a kind of witnessing”^[13] explore the appraisal of an individuals’ outward and inward lives that are recorded in both private and public. Later, witnessing in archives was used in a community context for documenting living archives as narratives to enable justice for victims of human rights violations. Riana-Alcala & Baines’ ‘archive in the witness’ explores situational characteristics of witnessing, particularly the process of inscription where testimony transforms into archive. This focus on emplaced practices and their inscription within memoryscapes and embodiment shifts away from written, quantitative, and discursive methods of documenting human rights violations and atrocity, emphasizing instead performative forms.^[14]

The move from a discursive to performative witnessing is pertinent here. Though this example references human rights violations, it nevertheless holds true to witnessing and recording animal rights violations and to the nanosecond archiving online now possible with social media technologies (e.g. through Facebook live). Beyond the concept of a living archive, social movements can enact strategic objectives ‘in and through time’ to mindfully set in place social change through ongoing activism, political pressure and lobbying for legislative change. Use of online platforms provides spaces for communities to share their evidence and memorialisation of their activity and to condemn the actions through publishing video or images of animal abuse and cruelty.

Activist-led research by the Center for Media Justice reflects on the power of the Internet to enable activism and for mobilisation of activist groups. In their research

100% of [activists] interviewed said that digital strategies and platforms provide a voice when mainstream media ignores issues …
The Internet is changing the meaning of membership and forcing social change leaders to re-think the forms of organization. More than 80% of respondents indicated that the Internet was helping to shift national organizations from centralized to de-centralized, from geographically specific to geographically diverse and from hierarchical leadership to multi-level leadership.^[15]

Sharing records online across the global networks of animal activists to develop strategy and political voice against silences in the mainstream media and provide eyewitness testimony. Visual and textual meaning-making for the group online mobilises a globally distributed community and attempts to accelerate the worldwide animal liberation movement. Activists are shaping public opinion, politics and the future using strategic witnessing: this is a radical form of recordkeeping. Creation and memorialisation of the record, archived in a nanosecond, is a performance within an activist community. Performance functions as an enabler in a social change network, in a virtual landscape of emancipated actors, allies and powerful opponents. Building identity and reflexively creating communities from past social movements, the strategies of activists can be deliberate, informed and evolving to disrupt criminalisation or condemnation of direct action.

Networks of Collective Memory and Identity

In the information age, functions and processes are increasingly organised around networks of people.^[16] In recordkeeping, the organisation as a network of established function has been an established norm for understanding development of archives. But networks are increasingly active in hubs of online platforms and communities working within and across corporate and non-corporate spaces. Embracing radical recordkeeping ideas could reshape traditional mindsets from purely organisation-focussed ones, to adapting to a new way of community organising and collaborating online. Frank Upward and colleagues highlight the need for this radically rethought practice in their conceptualisation of recordkeeping informatics, as a continuum-based view of the networked representation of records.^[17] While a focus of their recordkeeping informatics model is on “business activities” and its essential elements of metadata, provenance and appraisal of records can apply to recordkeeping in community contexts and their patterns of memory and identity building.

… in digital recordkeeping there are ever-increasing ways of capturing a record of action and each way affects the reliability and use of the record.^[18]

So, old ideas about how to describe, collate and organise records for archiving are more nuanced and complex in this view. This book builds upon the ideas in recordkeeping informatics but adapted to a community context where ‘business activities’ or even ‘organisation’ as a term does not suit the context of an animal activist group. There are resonances of records continuum in other technology writings that grapple with memory, networks and collective knowledge. Pierre Lévy, for example, understands socio-technical dynamics in space-time distanciation. On communities of collective intelligence and shared knowledge, Levy notes the

… neighbor across the hall, with whom I exchange hellos and goodbyes, is situated quite near me in ordinary space-time. But while reading the work of an author who has been dead for three hundred years, I can establish, within the space and signs of thought, a much stronger intellectual connection than I have with my neighbor. The people standing around me on the subway are more distant, within affective space, than my daughter or father, who are three hundred miles away.^[19]

The complexity of relationships and inability to dynamically document layers of interaction in traditional metadata and archival frameworks have limited the capacity to represent continuum contexts and networked communities effectively. The diverse relationships and complexities of provenance, appraisal and other foundational archival notions have not been accounted for adequately in archival projects. While there are many admirable projects, they are not adapting fast enough to the needs of a networked society of recordkeeping. And while repository-based projects and collections have made attempts at the representation of relationships according to a theme, event or community, Anne Gilliland puts it rightly that

… none of this is truly responding to the concept and pervasive effects of the networked society on the record, on the archive, and on how that archive might be used. A networked society is one where social, economic, political and cultural life is facilitated by and indeed is created through ubiquitous connectivity via digital information and communication networks … Much of the canon of archival ideas and their implementation in practice remain firmly based in non-network thinking … relegated in the popular mind to content generated in the pre-digital networking world. The roots of this can be traced back to some very fundamental ideas in archival science that derive from the traditional and still primary role of archives as institutional record-keepers. These ideas continue to reflect historical standalone bureaucratic structures and notions of centralized authority and control and do not translate well to a more diverse and widespread use and user base, nor do they protect equally the interests of all who are invested in or subjects of those records.^[20]

As the above demonstrates, a change in functional appraisal needs to move toward networked diffusion of recordkeeping practice and power by design. Networked archiving and citizenry can be embodied by the participatory movement and understanding how functions can operate in activist contexts could lead to new ways of respecting and partnering with community.

critical researchers explore ways to address this imbalance by proposing new perspectives on citizenship, collaboration and political engagement, while also emphasizing the importance of access to emerging social structures and cultural production models. Records continuum research further examines the intricate connections between identity, citizenship and recordkeeping across the continuum, including evidencing and memorialization through witnessing. Activist archivists advocate for sustaining activist archives that align with radical, anti-oppression commitments, emphasizing the need for infrastructure and platforms to reflect activist values. Pell underscores the political significance of archives, highlighting their role in promoting democracy and social justice by shaping knowledge practices. Overall, records play a pivotal role in documenting evidence, memorializing events and driving political change, with the politics of community often mirrored in the organization of radical (or rogue) archives.

Setting up the frameworks for recordkeeping and social change are part of radical recordkeeping. The discussion of the frameworks for change, rather than an archival reactionary action, is gaining momentum in the literature around participatory frameworks and human rights.^[21] Re-thinking post-hoc, ad-hoc and traditional appraisal, radical recordkeeping takes a critical view of power relations between archives and activist, preferencing the participatory over the patriarchal. It reflects the support of political change from the bottom up. Activist authors like Deva Woodly reinforce this power transition to realise the inherent power of activist communities rather than the patronising ‘empowerment’ by anyone outside the community itself. Woodly notes that “shifting mainstream public discourse is the best – and in most cases the only – way to achieve lasting change”.^[22] This statement aligns with a radical view of participatory archiving. A true participatory model questions the control of community records by archivists or government-run archival institutions to achieve a shift in mainstream perspectives.

Archival infrastructure and systems for evaluating, categorizing and accessing records are rooted in tradition, unable to fully consider the various rights associated with them beyond basic concepts like who made them, owns them, or keeps them safe. These entrenched practices uphold existing power structures instead of allowing for open discussion and negotiation. Also, they lack ways to ensure they are transparent and accountable.^[23] “Radical transformation is required to allow for multiple rights in records to be respected, acknowledged, represented and managed”.^[24]

Anticipatory Witnessing

In the human rights and media rights communities, respect, safety, privacy and autonomy in the use of platforms is paramount,^[25] but media specialists are yet to draw from the discourse around continuum understandings of radical transformation through participatory recordkeeping by communities. At a web archiving conference in 2018, it was well understood the power of activists to create “Archives for Change”^[26] but the web archiving narratives about activist archives are yet to draw from informatics or continuum understandings of format-agnostic traces in a continuum of action/performance. The term performance is used in this book to describe actions of actors that are subject to and need to work against regulatory frameworks within their recordkeeping and social change endeavours. This struggle to witness, investigate, record and share can be seen as control, particularly in political struggles. In the realm of politics, witnessing emerges as a dynamic arena, as described by Pierre Bourdieu, where various agents, interests, resources and positions converge around the events being observed.^[27] Similarly, Ashuri and Pinchevski emphasise that the act of bearing witness is not merely a privilege bestowed upon individuals but a product of ongoing struggle and accomplishment.^[28] Within their conceptualization, witnessing takes shape as a field characterised by intricate networks involving eyewitnesses, mediators and audiences, forming the fabric through which events are perceived and interpreted.^[29]

McCammon defines anticipatory witnessing as pre-emptive control by the state and powerful stakeholders. The politically-charged act of witnessing using radical recordkeeping defies anticipatory witnessing. Ag-Gag legislation and the inability to witness in tightly controlled spaces shows how activists strive to participate on an even footing with empowered actors, including the media, in the current recordkeeping frameworks. Through Ag-Gag, the government and the industries it supports performs “anticipatory witnessing” because “the state also ensures that certain investigative stories cannot be told”.^[30] This power and vetting enforce punitive measures against animal activist groups filming animal agriculture and criminalise these truth-telling activities. Other activists, such as anti-gentrification activists, are also undermined by their alleged anti-social and criminal behaviour.^[31] Animal activists also face a cycle of distrust and criminal allegations from the power holders of the popular narrative.^[32]. Since 2024, Meta has announced its algorithmic censoring of politically driven engagement on their platforms.^[33] Some authors have described the types of “digital repression”^[34] used against activist groups, where the higher the risk or threat level of that group to the status quo, the more censorship and anticipatory repression these activists face.

Governments often perceive protest and other civil conflicts as threats to order and stability and respond with repression. This phenomenon is referred to as “the law of coercive responsiveness”.^[35] As corporate platforms like Meta wield more power to punish or demote social influence of activists, the promotion of archival rights and autonomy to support radical recordkeeping processes can help redress the imbalances. Like in Gregory Rolan’s call for participatory frameworks and archival agency, a new approach is needed to create and support change on a societal level and to deflect external control or interference where it is unwanted.^[36] Rather than participation for accommodation’s sake, a new model for “designing and building the next generation of participatory recordkeeping systems”^[37] has promise to support the activist agency in achieving societal transformation.

Radical frameworks already exist to a large extent, as shown in a 2011 case study of Wikileaks; which argues the development of a structure that has supported Wikileaks can be considered a radical archive.^[38] If we see Wikileaks as an exploration in redefined rights management, the accessibility of records fundamentally alters how society interacts with archives. We can interpret the WikiLeaks phenomenon as a chance to innovate and experiment with reshaping our professional norms, complexity and plurality.^[39]

With the whistle-blower records placed online by anonymous sources, Wikileaks publishes classified information in radical ways. Activists and whistle-blowers are seeking their own “archival justice”^[40] in unique and varied ways as the technology allows and highlights failures with traditional structures to equitably reach a broad and diverse audience. It is the underlying power of these restrictive epistemic systems that need “radical transformation”^[41] Community self-determination and participation in societal memory can be achieved through archival autonomy^[42] and highlights the role of records in developing the political agency of communities in progressing human rights and social justice.

Mere documentation of community individuals is insufficient.^[43] Instead, archival autonomy for radical recordkeeping should be “an integral part of social movements on local and global scales.” ^[44] The nature and role of recordkeeping for animal activism is to strategically witness and will require autonomy to create and manage collective memories and evidence. But it is a complex picture, as the platforms that enable autonomy conversely can take power and ownership away. The records continuum supports a critical view of power holders and epistemic systems of knowledge, structures and frameworks.

Socio-Technical Security

Information security discourse is beginning to reflect community ideals, considering the socio-technical in building new ways to engender trust in systems. Socio-technical security can lend some human-centred ideas to redesign and disrupt traditional infrastructure for activist archives. Socio-technical security is founded on the idea that security protocols in a system consider social and organisational needs, not just technical requirements.^[45] The use and applicability of security for activist platforms and systems can be viewed as part of an appraisal process for grassroots groups. Traditionally, humans have been the ‘weakest link’ in Information Technology security, but there is a shift to engage with values, peer trust and cooperation in systems design.^[46]

A human-centred and socio-technical approach to disrupted recordkeeping infrastructure to support radical recordkeeping is one way to consider redevelopment of recordkeeping infrastructure and an affront to the centralised and unethical design of systems like Facebook and others. This disruption in design implements community-centred controls that have been previously in the realm of protecting business and corporate interests. Technological security shouldn’t be confined to a rigid dichotomy of bottom-up or top-down processes. Rather, a potential paradigm could be a horizontal framework, where local communities exchange and adopt best practices collaboratively, thereby being empowered to enact necessary technical adaptations. Security is inherently dynamic, resembling a moving target that requires continual vigilance and adaptation.^[47] This can apply to socio-technical and adaptive modelling of security. This notion of security as an ongoing endeavor is reinforced by its continuous nature, urging for a perpetual commitment to refinement and improvement.^[48] In the activist context, those risking anticipatory witnessing use threat modelling in their systems design (Diehm et al., 2020) to protect themselves and susceptible groups (such as human rights defenders). In a continuum view of recordkeeping, these threat models and design features can represent risk-based appraisal decisions within systems design even before records creation. 

Conclusion

The rise of citizen witnessing marks a shift in activism, giving rise to strategic witnessing and radical recordkeeping. The concept of strategic witnessing, as articulated by Sandra Ristovska, underscores the importance of new media forms in activism, offering new platforms for citizen witnesses to document and share events in real time. This strategic approach to witnessing is exemplified by the animal liberation movement, which leverages online platforms to amplify their message and mobilise communities.

Also, the notion of anticipatory witnessing sheds light on the pre-emptive control exerted by powerful actors, such as governments and corporations, to suppress dissent and maintain the status quo. Activists defy anticipatory witnessing through radical recordkeeping, challenging restrictive epistemic systems and reclaiming agency over their narratives. The intersection of citizen witnessing, anticipatory witnessing and radical recordkeeping can be overlaid into the complexity of continuum theory, to help analyse the impacts of community autonomy and power in activism. By embracing socio-technical security measures, activists and archivists can consider new ways to safeguard social movements and drive lasting change. Archival scholars and practitioners must adapt to support grassroots activism, recognizing the need for participatory frameworks and decentralised infrastructure. By empowering communities to document their own histories and challenge dominant narratives, together can foster a more equitable and just society.