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in april 2007 YouTube launched the political video log (vlog) “CitizenTube ,” in order to“add fuel to the revolution that isYouTube politics.”1 The phrase“YouTube Politics” hints at a democracy of speech and ideas ostensibly enabled by the new media technologies that grant tools of video production, exhibition, and distribution to noninstitutional actors. The phrase equally positsYouTube as a site of civic engagement, a place where audiences can become publics.The claim raises questions aroundYouTube and, more broadly, the Internet as a platform for witnessing and for representing distant human rights abuses in efforts to cultivate witnessing publics and response. Photographic media have played a significant role in establishing an iconographic lexicon that contributes to popular, legal, and political understandings of genocide and human rights violations. These media have also aided in developing claims and activating sentiment in order to mobilize action. As the book has addressed so far, this witnessing function is best understood within a field of witnessing production , which takes into account the discursive terrain of testimony, the political economy behind the organization of the encounter, and the strategies of exhibition and reception. How does the terrain change with this shift to the Internet, something that is “at once technology, medium, and engine of social relations”?2 Useful to this new field are Pierre Levy’s formulations of knowledge space, collective intelligence, and the cosmopedia, which present a dynamic field of encounter and exchange that result in shared knowledge, skills, and the potential for action. The cosmopedia, or “virtual agora” functions as a form of public sphere, where “members of this thinking community search, inscribe, connect, consult, explore,” using the knowledge space as “a site of collective discussion, negotiation and development.”3 Henry i W I T N E S S E S A N D C I T I Z E N T U B E Focus on Darfur 5 1 7 2 • 05 Chapter 5_Torchin 9/10/2012 1:51 PM Page 172 Jenkins’s suggestion that “online fan communities are the most fully realized versions of Levy’s cosmopedia” enriches the possibilities of thinking about the cosmopedia as a site for witnessing.4 United by affinity, fan communities as active consumers or “interactive audiences” are primed for action and participation in their field of images. Even before the popularization of the Internet, fans interacted with their texts, attending conventions and writing fan fiction. Their interaction could have bearing on the content. Jenkins explains, “Star Trek fans were, from the start, an activist audience, lobbying to keep the series on the air and later advocating specific changes in the program content.”5 Over the years, this activity has increased, ameliorated by the rapid development of technology and the growth in users, leading Jenkins to observe, “cyberspace is fandom writ large.”6 Such an observation has productive resonance for thinking through how the Internet has contributed to the representation of genocide and human rights violations, and how this new technology/medium/space produces witnessing publics. This chapter outlines the impact and possibilities of this new technology in representing and mobilizing response in relation to the ongoing crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan. Recognizing the vast array of media in the cosmopedia, the chapter looks at the work of websites, online games, and Internet video as sites of witnessing to genocide and the promotion of participation and action. Reading through the sites, I analyze content and interface to see how they cultivate communities of concern—intelligence communities as activist witnesses. How is the case represented to promote urgency and response and what are the spaces for interaction provided? With this perspective the chapter’s survey of materials teases out the ways in which Internet technologies enable witnessing to an ongoing crisis and help to furnish tools and agents for social change. Internet Activism Broadly speaking, Internet activism refers to the use of online technologies such as e-mail, file sharing, and websites to organize communities, raise funds, and lobby for change. Even before the interactivity lauded in the arrival ofWeb 2.0, the advocacy potential of the new technologies was evident. Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers’s edited collection Cyberactivism : Online Activism in Theory and Practice offers a useful overview of the types of activism already coming to the fore in 2001 and earlier, and i W I T N E S S E S A N D C I T I Z E N T U B E • 1 7...

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