The power of digital video

Undoubtedly, each digital invention remarks a turning point in people's lives. My father once told me how the emergence of TV(Black and white) made a remarkable difference in society. As you mentioned the price of TV was expensive and not all people can afford it, so people used to get together and enjoy watching their favourite TV-series Sah El Nom صح النوم to the extent that the city became under curfew.

Also, the point of how digital video, a radical digital humanities tool, is used as a weapon to interrogate power through social media platforms is another justification of how digital media enable not only textual activism but also video activism. It provides audio-visual documentation and citizen journalism, up to the specificity of the so-called smartphone journalism (Newell as cited in Hermida & Hernández-Santaolalla, 2018 p.419). For the Gamonal Spain case in January 2014, people protested upon the decision of transforming the street Vitoria, one of the main arteries of the city, into a boulevard(Hermida & Hernández-Santaolalla, 2018 p.416). Protestors conveyed their extreme projection and made pressure on the policymakers by challenging the surveillance system to become bottom to top direction, i.e. sousveillance. Twitter was a critical medium that facilitates communication between people when they share videos that show the violent action that police did "the most shared videos within the category of witness video were those documenting extreme charges and questionable police procedures."(Hermida & Hernández-Santaolalla, 2018 p.430). Some aspects mentioned in terms of testing the video production process such as the natural sound and the angle that spotted the violent incident. Two previous similar incidents happened, but people could not change anything; however, video activism through Twitter was successful for a sociopolitical change as it made an outstanding fulfilment in convincing the authority to stop the construction. "Thus, not only the ideas of the citizen participatory panopticon (Cascio, 2005) and the catoptic structure (Ganascia, 2010) are reinforced, but also the concept of ‘secondary visibility’ (Goldsmith, 2010) about the abuses committed by state security forces made a distinct achievement in convincing them to stop the demolishing." (Hermida & Hernández-Santaolalla, 2018 p.430).

For the gender and digital video, I think that digital media made a significant development regarding female portrayal. A year ago, I made a poster discussing the role of social media in Arab women empowerment. Nour Hadad is a Syrian journalist. In 2014, Nour started to film self-short videos reflecting on the latest updates, primarily political, of the Syrian crisis on her FB account. After that, she has worked with Al Arabic TV channel and Syrian TV channel by presenting Nour Khanom program. This program deals with the Arabic and Syrian events in a sarcastic manner. Its idea builds on Nour’s decision to leave her work in media, but she finds herself in a confront of a political reality that she could only face by sarcasm.