Smartphones and video as security articulation infrastructures: evidencing Black Lives Matter

Abstract

Smartphone videos can co-constitute security reality. As smartphones spread in the 2010s, videos of deadly police violence against Black United States citizens became common, and over time these videos co-constituted anti-Black police violence as a security issue, which found its expression as Black Lives Matter (BLM). This article questions the role that smartphones and video play for BLM, and argues that security theory needs a better grasp of security articulation. Mapping the mediation of BLM's first decade, the article documents that smartphones are security articulation infrastructures as bystanders routinely rely on smartphone video to articulate security. The epistemic authority of video enables BLM videos to act as infrastructural gateways connecting established mass media to new vernacular media. Video mediation denies recognized figures of authority interpretive monopoly and enables non-elites to participate in constituting security reality, creating a room for non-elite Black Americans' articulation of insecurity. The article shows that still images and videos are different in this respect, and calls for security theory to take articulation formats and infrastructures seriously. When leaving ‘communication’ to other disciplines or enacting government responses as constitutive of (visual) security, scholarship risks overlooking the epistemic racism limiting security articulation in ‘old’ mass media, and risks making security theory complicit in epistemically silencing the voices of common, marginalized and racialized people.