Independence Square in Kiev, in a live connection image from the webcam of the YouTube channel of El País. EL PAÍS
While these words are being typed, there are 24,354 people connected to the fixed shot that focuses, live, on Kiev's Independence Square from
The Washington Post
's YouTube channel .
No
voiceover
narrates the situation.
There are no last hours with superimposed texts that stain the image, sound effects that alert the viewer, or split screens with experts giving their opinion on geopolitical implications.
The image, practically naked and without artifice, works as a window with direct sound to what is happening in that corner of a country at war.
A few cars, tiny from the aerial point of view, can be seen driving at dusk.
Its sound is like that of a placid wave of the sea, passing by a practically deserted city.
The Post
's camera
is not the only one that has tens of thousands of Internet users hooked.
Most national and international newspapers, including EL PAÍS, have or have had the same connection integrated into their YouTube channels with thousands of other connected users.
On February 16, the Reuters agency had to interrupt its transmission from that same square because a prankster, rather than being frightened by a possible air attack, decided that it was the ideal time to fly his drone holding a sign that read "For sale". parking space” as a humorous nod to the whole issue in the midst of an escalation of global tension.
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Last minute Russia - Ukraine
“Nothing is fake here;
there is no algorithm.
It is not a screen on which TV pundits discuss Russia's next move.
The live stream isn't trying to convince me of anything;
it just shows me things as they are.
The cars escape somewhere before the sun rises.
Window to window, the morning light creeps through the buildings.
Kievans begin their morning routine,” writes Jane Lytvynenko, a Ukrainian who works as a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy, about how this near-silent direct broadcast calms her anxiety about to the terror of thinking about what could happen in their home of origin.
She that's how she described it in
I can't stop watching the live connection to Kiev
in The Atlantic
magazine
.
“For weeks now, technology has taken over all of my waking hours.
Everything is online.
Misleading pro-Kremlin videos are all over Telegram.
TikTok offers clips of young people in Ukraine explaining what is happening and videos of the arrival of military equipment.
The debates on Twitter are endless.
A Zello channel [an app that works like a
walkie talkie
] is always chattering in the background, like some kind of citizen radio.
The news that arrives through this technology has been overwhelming”, writes the journalist, regarding the torrential information about the war and why that fixed screen works as a distracting element while remaining connected to her house.
#UKRAINE/@Reuters—The straw that broke the camel's back.
Reuters reportedly decided to terminate its livestream of #Russia | n invasion of the #Kiev #Maidan square after some enterprising entrepreneur started using a drone to advertise the sale of his garage in #Solomyanka.
pic.twitter.com/fyNbnywujL
— Gleb Bazov (@gbazov) February 16, 2022
When Lytvynenko shared the text on his Twitter account, he received responses from users who turn to this camera as an escape route to the feverish sounding board that social networks become in times of
doomscrolling
(or the
doomsday
scroll
). , that is, when we compulsively consume news about catastrophes or wars without being able to stop, which generates even more anxiety).
“I can't stop looking at her either.
Every day for the last week and a half I have been looking out that window at the Plaza de Independencia.
Seeing the traffic normally calmed the anxiety I felt for Ukraine”, replied a tweeter
From the Arab Spring in 2011 to 15-M or the Black Lives Matter movement, the consumption of live broadcasts online has exploded on the networks in the last decade as a strategy to generate empathy and make viewers in the distance feel connected and Be aware of conflicts.
It is defended in his essay
Livestreaming from the front line and witnesses in the distance
by the academic Sam Gregory, an expert in the power of the image and in the use of participatory technologies in issues related to human rights.
Gregory believes that while such images may fall into the "improper peeping distance" between viewers and
streamers
, if the
webcams
and live broadcasts in the digital sphere have served a purpose, it has been “to facilitate connection and solidarity”.
This was the case with the live broadcast of the 2019 Barcelona riots from the local channel, BTV, which decided to bet on a three-way screen for almost a whole week to narrate, with few contributions, in a neutral tone and using the power of the live image, what happened in the altercations in the city.
This coverage away from the imposed adrenaline of other channels earned the news team a Ciutat de Barcelona award in 2021 for "proximity, honesty and transparency" in the portrayal of the clashes after the sentence of the
procès
.
The paradox of the matter appears when those same
webcams
that show the conflict now mutate into spaces that serve to breathe from the toxicity, noise and anxiety produced by information consumption on social networks.
In the era of the new environmental television, when those channels that only broadcast chimneys burning for 24 hours in the early 2000s have been transformed into
webcams
connected to any corner of the planet —from puddles in the jungle of Tanzania to phenomena like Windowswap, which offers the opportunity to open windows in different cities and places around the globe—, the consumption of war had to arrive in a fixed shot.
Live cameras that work as war distractors.
Windows that allow us to be connected to current affairs, but without the surplus of opinions and the suffocation of compulsive consumption of news.
In 2022, when the current situation gets even more uphill and the networks confuse us with shouts due to the polarized interpretations of the conflict, that
webcam
from the Independence Square in Ukraine is also, for the moment, a way to escape from terror of a war that everyone wants to interpret live and direct.
