Mundane Witness

Abstract

In Seeing Things (Ellis, 2000, pp. 6–38), I asserted that broadcast moving images turn modern citizens into witnesses of the events of their time. Further, I claim that this process has produced a new and distinct form of perception which carries a sense of responsibility — however weak — towards those events, summed up in the telling words ‘they cannot say that they did not know’. The arguments outlined in Seeing Things may have unleashed a debate, but they now seem inadequate. Others have developed the concept (see Peters, 2001; Rentschler, 2004; Frosh, 2006; Scannell, 2004). Peters, for instance, has brought considerable clarity to the distinctions involved in the noun ‘witness’:

The term involves all three points of a basic communication triangle: (1) the agent who bears witness, (2) the utterance or text itself, (3) the audience who witnesses. It is thus a strange but intelligible sentence to say: the witness (speech-act) of the witness (person) was witnessed (by an audience) (Peters, 2001, p. 701).