[Erin Foster]: This is KALX Berkeley, 90.FM. Welcome back to Berkeley Brainwaves, a show highlighting stories from the Cal campus. I’m Erin Foster.
[Miriam Reichenberg]: And I’m Miriam Reichenberg.
[Erin Foster]: Together, we sat down with Dr. Alexa Koenig to talk about online graphic trauma, and what it means to bear witness to tragedy in the digital age. Just a short content warning– this conversation includes discussions of violence and death, including shootings. Listener discretion is advised. Here’s that conversation, recorded on March 18th.
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[Miriam Reichenberg]: It’s a pleasure to welcome Alexa Koenig, scholar, lawyer, and human rights advocate. Alexa is the faculty director of the Human Rights Center and Director of HRC’s Investigations program. She trains students and professionals to use open source investigation tools to advance human rights research, reporting, and accountability.
[Erin Foster]: Her most recent book published in 2023 and co-authored with Andrea Lambros entitled Graphic: Trauma and Meaning in our Online Lives explores how graphic images circulate online and what it means for all of us to constantly encounter trauma on our screens. Alexa, welcome and thank you for taking the time to be here on Berkeley Brainwaves.
[Alexa Koenig]: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[Erin Foster]: So I think we wanted to start off by saying, can you start by sharing with us the work of the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley?
[Alexa Koenig]: Absolutely. So the Human Rights Center has been here on the Cal campus for approximately 30 years. We were set up initially with a focus on fellowships. For students, and it’s a program we’re deeply proud of. We continue to offer paid fellowships every summer to undergrads and grads from across campus to get them thinking about how they can partner with a frontline human rights organization and really take whatever skillset they have, whether it’s computer science, social science, law, journalism, you name it. Really put that, um, the contributions that they have out into the world. Since then, we’ve grown significantly. What we’re really proud of is being a hub on campus where we can bring people from different disciplines together to work on issues that we’re all passionate about. So, issues of common human rights concern. Our motto is to pursue justice through science, technology, and law. We recently went through a restructure where we were asking ourselves, what’s the biggest contribution we as a Berkeley organization can make to the broader human rights field? And one of the areas where we realized we’d played a really central role was in developing this intersection of human rights and technology. So today we really think about how new and emerging technologies are
impacting people’s lived experiences and how we can harness some of these new forms of technology to benefit people’s human rights and mitigate some of those harms.
[Miriam Reichenberg]: To transition to talking about your book– Graphic: Trauma and Meaning in our Online Lives– it examines how graphic images circulate online and shape how we understand trauma. And so can you share what inspired you and your co-author to write this book?
[Alexa Koenig]: Absolutely. So Andrea and I had just started the lab in September of 2016 here at Berkeley Law, and thankfully one of our partners from Amnesty International, a guy named Sam DeLee, had spent a lot of years thinking about the ways that journalists were experiencing secondary trauma. Um, the effects of reporting on other people’s traumatic experiences and realizing that as a broader community of practice, there needed to be a lot more attention paid to the psychosocial aspect of all of this. So he provided an initial training to our students of just some basic tips and tricks that you can use when combing social media sites to minimize some of the potential harms. Andrea and I quickly realized that maybe that wasn’t enough. That we needed to really shift our entire culture of the way that we were working. At the same time that we’re providing ourselves and our students with individual skill sets and thinking through structurally how do we enforce and how do we support some of the, um, interventions that we might be trying to. To collaboratively create to minimize the risk of harm. So I, we had also been very fortunate to work with a woman named Elizabeth Farmsworth, who is on the advisory board for our um, organization. She was a long-time work correspondent, and I remember when we first showcased what our students had done in that first semester of investigations, she came up to me afterwards and said, Alexa, this is incredible. But how are you gonna keep these kids safe? Because she knew from firsthand experience the toll that reporting on difficult topics can take. We are in a moment in history where really no generation before this one has ever been bombarded with the breadth of graphic imagery, um, that we are all experiencing today. And just that prevalence and the salience of it is something that I think even if you’re not working in this space, is really important to be thinking through. Andrea and I started taking very seriously the recognition that immersing students and drowning them in this data day in and day out on top of all the stresses of their day-to-day lives could potentially become quite dangerous if we weren’t quite thoughtful about how to approach it.
[Erin Foster]: Mm-hmm. Well, and I mean, given events in Minnesota last year and the, um, current military action in Iran, the book continues to be extremely relevant. So, which parts of the book now feel more urgent? Or most relevant to you?
[Alexa Koenig]: I think one of the things that surprised Andrea and me was we started writing this book before the pandemic. The pandemic was such a historic marker for really shifting people’s ways of relating to each other and increasing our dependence on digital technologies for communication that I don’t think we anticipated how timely this book could become. We also have very different lived experiences. And both our identities and our lived experiences are known to create potentially additional vulnerabilities. Um, for example, I at one point was in, um, a mass shooting, and for me it’s gunshots. And we learned early on for Andrea, it was because
she had children of her own. It was any violence towards children. So thinking about and being sensitive to the fact that we might be particularly raw to those forms of violence and to think about how from a professional level we could compliment each other’s work or even trade off work became important. Um, when we interviewed people for the book graphic, one of the things that we also found and heard repeatedly, we were asking everybody about George Floyd’s murder. Because at the time we were researching this, he had just recently been killed. The video had circulated widely and we figured it was an important touchstone for how people were engaging with this kind of material. What we found, we asked everyone, did you watch the video? And what we found is that the responses, at least anecdotally, really broke down along racial lines where a lot of the people that we interviewed who identify as black said. They did not need to watch the killing of a black man to know the violence against black populations that happens in this country every day. Um, there was also raised to the point of how many people were just constantly sending them the video without any warning or heads up about what they might be exposed to. For a lot of the people that we interviewed who identify as white, they said, no, I did watch the video. I felt I had a moral obligation to better understand what is happening in this country and to see it from my own eyes and to process what had taken place. And there was yet a third cohort of former students of ours and current students who said, um, I didn’t feel it was respectful to watch the video. Many of these students are students of color and I think. It was really fascinating. They said I didn’t need to watch the video. I felt there were other sources of information that I could use, like reading a newspaper article or hearing a summary about it. That felt like a better balance. So there’s the awareness piece.
[Erin Foster]: You’re listening to K-A-L-X Berkeley 90. 7 FM. This is Berkeley Brainwaves.
[Miriam Reichenberg]: So graphic images from different contexts appear online, side by side. We see like violence in, um, Minnesota next to violence in Iran. You know, there’s this like domestic conflict and then international conflict and we’re seeing posts side by side. Um, how does this affect how we interpret violence and distinguish between the two?
[Alexa Koenig]: Ooh, great question. Um, I mean, maybe I’ll start with what’s common. I do think there’s a real potential to see parallels between what has taken place in Iran with protests there, uh, versus what we are seeing in terms of the solidarity around protests happening that have been happening in Minneapolis. Mm-hmm. And to recognize that we are not unique. Um, there’s this concept of American exceptionalism that in some of my legal studies classes or law classes, I’ve often taught. Which is this notion that prevailed for decades, that the US was somehow exceptional and that we’re very different than other places. Mm-hmm. That notion has been challenged and rightfully so in my opinion, in recent years where. We have recognized that we are more vulnerable to things like mass outbreaks of protests to potential rises in authoritarianism, authoritarianism, et cetera, in ways that actually better connect us to other countries that have experienced similar phenomena. So I think that piece, that commonality is really powerful. Important in terms of distinguishing them, I mean, one thing that really came up repeatedly when Andrea and I were interviewing people for the book graphic was how much. It’s like the kind of emotional distance you have from something really does depend on your identity and your experiences. So, you know, for some people seeing what’s happening in Minneapolis
and maybe seeing harms against people like themselves may resonate in a way that seeing people in other countries doesn’t. For students on this campus or people in our broader community who are Iranian American or are from, um, or descended from people who relate to a country that’s currently going through a crisis, there may be additional kind of salience to what they’re witnessing in these digital spaces. Digital technologies have made our world feel a lot smaller and a lot more intimate.
[Miriam Reichenberg]: This is an excellent segue into my next question, which is like, historically news editors they’re, have like acted as gatekeepers, right? They had editorial oversight, but with the rise of social media and all these images and videos online, how has this shift changed the way images are circulated?
[Alexa Koenig]: Yeah, I mean, there’s such a qualitative and quantitative difference in terms of what we’re exposed to today and how we’re exposed to it. So, you know, even 20 years ago you would maybe have the newspaper delivered to your house in print form and you’d pick it up and you’d kind of read the paper over a cup of coffee or breakfast, um, if you weren’t racing off to work or whatever. And. It was very contained, so the images that you would come across would’ve been shot most likely by professional photographers who had really been trained to think about the ethics of imagery, what you show to broader publics, often trying to show tremendous dignity for the deceased, et cetera, and not really pushed too much of the graphic content. Onto your faces. Um, even with, uh, broadcast television, I mean, there was still real careful thinking about how to curate materials to minimize some of the risks for the public. Today, what we’re getting is just a volume that is not contained to. Your newspaper or the morning or evening news, it’s something that we have with us 24 7. Should we choose to look at it so frequently? So I think that quantity is a big piece of it. The other, the qualitative nature is with so much user generated content. So content that’s captured on smartphones by people who are adjacent to where things are happening. Um, it’s much more raw and it’s much more unfiltered. So you’re more likely to be exposed to the most graphic information. A lot of times when people are posting, they’re trying to bring attention to that particular segment or piece, and so they’re showing you the most salacious material and the stuff that is most designed to give an emo, get an emotional reaction. In order to prompt people to do something about what’s just happened, and that is a really different purpose than educating the public about the facts, the underlying facts of a particular incident. And it’s something, I don’t think just kind of generally across society, we’ve really spent enough time thinking about and talking about.
[Erin Foster]: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that makes, I mean, it does make a lot of sense and we’re all like, sort of experiencing that. So you do, well, both of you write about this idea of bearing witness, um, to images of violence and how that can be meaningful, even if it doesn’t lead to policy change. Mm-hmm. So what are ways though that, that sort of witnessing can be meaningful?
[Alexa Koenig]: One thing we hear quite frequently from people who are going through a crisis is that they often feel forgotten by outside communities, and sometimes that’s true that the stories, the narratives around what they’ve just experienced isn’t making the news. Other times,
they may just not be aware of how many outside communities actually care. So I think whenever there are opportunities to help, um, individuals or groups understand that other people know what’s taken place mm-hmm. That can be a really powerful act of support and even solidarity. Um, this makes me think of a study that we did at the Human Rights Center probably about a decade ago, where we were looking at all these countries that had exploded into conflict and we did a. A survey where we interviewed people from four countries that were providing information to the international criminal court about the conflicts that had taken place. And one of the things, um, that we found was very powerful is for them to just even write up their story and send it to the court, even if nobody got back to them, even if they never became a witness someday. That just knowing someone else knew what they had gone through and was probably going to read this was deeply meaningful to them, and I think helped them feel that some sort of justice could happen even if it wasn’t tomorrow and was 30 years down the road. So that’s a big piece of it. I also think there’s a little bit around the how you witness that is important to think through. Andrea and I interviewed a number of longstanding investigators. Um, one had investigated the killing of JonBenet Ramsey a little girl many decades ago, and had also investigated the killing of John F. Kennedy back in the 1960s. And we asked him. How he was doing with all of this graphic material that he was repeatedly combing through first in kind of more analog context and then in digital spaces, and he said. It’s really about the how you come to the work. And for him, because it’s a job, he almost feels like he puts on this forensic suit and mm-hmm. Is calming through these images, but he has a reason to calm through those images. I think where we’ve seen repeatedly people be most vulnerable is when they don’t have a reason to look. And if you can even shape that reason to be. I want to be able to support or at least be able to communicate with others about what people have gone through. Um, that can be a really powerful motivator, but it can also be deeply protective.
[Miriam Reichenberg]: Um, kind of jumping off our conversation just now about bearing witness. Some critics, you know, might argue that focusing on how we consume I imagery, you know, centers the viewer rather than the victim. How would you respond to that?
[Alexa Koenig]: I think that’s a really important point. Uh, and I think that gets back to what we were just discussing about the why are you watching in the first place and do you have a reason to be looking? Um, it’s so important to, I think, remain informed about what’s happening in the world, but I think there are different ways that we can do it into different end purposes. Are you doing it because you’re an influencer and you’re trying to get additional clicks or likes or make money off of other people’s pain, which I think unfortunately in today’s society is one of many options that are out there, or are you trying to better understand what’s happening in the world? So that when you go to the voting booth or you send in your ballot like you feel confident. That you are making decisions, um, with the rights that you have as you know, in this country to vote and to hopefully influence the future in ways that are deeply informed by what’s actually happening on the ground. We are in a moment where there is, to some extent, I think there’s a real war on facts right now. Mm-hmm. And so one question that we’re constantly asking at the human rights Center is how do we help build faith in facts? That sort of gets back to why we’re trying to work with so many different individuals across this campus because I think when you do get the basic skills of how to effectively find relevant information in online spaces, how to
verify its accuracy, how do you know what to trust and whatnot, what is not trustworthy in digital space? I think that’s deeply empowering and it’s a skill that everybody really needs today in order to make sure that what they’re consuming is actually healthy information. Accurate information as opposed to adding to the noise and to the propaganda that unfortunately is circulating.
[Erin Foster]: You’re listening to K-A-L-X Berkeley 90. 7 FM. This is Berkeley Brainwaves.
[Erin Foster]: I guess go back to a bit of what we were talking about, um, related to the book. And one of the pieces, you know, we’ve touched on is kind of the individual and as an individual, things you can do to sort of engage with imagery or other things. Um, you also, in the book, you talk about community as a protective force. Mm-hmm. And, um, as a way of being able to, you know, kind of confront some of the traumatic imagery, but also just engage and kind of keep each other, keep community and, and build, um, sort of safety in a way. So what, what did that look like from your perspective and, I don’t know, in Minneapolis, for example, and how can communities create, uh, healthier ways of experiencing this together?
[Alexa Koenig]: Yeah, I mean. Social media at its worst can be incredibly isolating. Mm-hmm. So I think we’ve all had the experience of you’re alone, you scroll through your phone, like to look at social media to feel more connected to other people, and sometimes it can leave you feeling even more detached. Particularly when what you’re seeing is not necessarily what your friends are posting or your family, but people who are strangers who are trying to sell you something. So one, there’s a field known as positive psychology, and one of the things Andrea and I learned from that field of practice is that there’s a whole body of research happening right now to figure out when you are exposed to traumatic content, graphic, or otherwise. How do we help to bend the possibility that you’re gonna come through that experience, feeling more connected to other human beings. More committed to your own purpose. Have a strong sense of meaning. Mm-hmm. As opposed to experiencing secondary or vicarious trauma and finding yourself permanently affected. Researchers have shown that when someone goes, experiences something traumatic, the vast majority of people after two to three months will return to their baseline of functioning. They’ll be eating the same amount, they’ll be drinking the same amount, sleeping, et cetera. The, there is a small tail end of people who are permanently negatively impaired by that experience who maybe never stop having nightmares or start drinking excessively and are not able to stop, et cetera. And maybe they feel their whole world view has shifted around whether humans are good versus bad, et cetera. Mm-hmm. There’s another tail end that’s been observed of people who come through that experience. Feeling like they’ve grown and that their world has actually expanded and they feel more connected to other people as a result. So this body of research is really about how do we maximize that potential? There are people that are studying military personnel and others who regularly confront difficult things. Um, and I think there’s a lot of interventions that we can learn even in the reporting field or in the human rights practice field from that about what we should be doing. One of the big takeaways though, is how protective a sense of community can actually be. And because of that insight, we have always tried to have students working in teams within our investigations lab, and there is a lot of attention paid about the culture we’re trying to build within that team so that people feel
that they’re recognized as individuals, not just as cogs in the wheel to do like unpaid labor that is perhaps very meaningful, but that they really see their place in it. We also don’t wanna end up in a place where, let’s say you are investigating something related to Ukraine or Syria, where all students here in Berkeley, California are exposed to is the pain and suffering of what’s happening in Syria or Iran, or where you name the location. Mm-hmm. And so we also try to figure out and think through how can we celebrate the cultures, understand the rich music and food and everything else, and feel more. Um, connected to and focus on some of the positives of those communities as well, so that eventually when students leave the projects, they don’t think, oh, Iran, and they think about a horrible airstrike or some other phenomenon. So there’s community within, I think us, as you know, here at Berkeley, there’s a sense of community on the teams. We will often partner students so they at least have one other person who’s kind of watching out for their wellbeing. Mm-hmm. Can even be a, a form of peer review. We find the quality of the work is actually better when we have that deeper sense of community and then that we celebrate the milestones. Um, as much as we are never celebrating the horrific things that many of the people whose experiences we’re recording have gone through, it is celebrating that maybe we’re one step closer to a story being written. Or a case being filed. Yeah. And someday that community getting justice.
[Erin Foster]: Yeah. And I think there’s a quote that I pulled out from the book where it says, uh, collective action, like collective grief can be a powerful antidote to the pain and heaviness of the world. Mm-hmm. It, it feels like exactly that. Yeah. That, that ability to do something. So the intent we’re talking about earlier and then doing it as a community to sort of make change is. Is powerful. There was, and it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t mean the grief goes away, but it allows to kind of coexist.
[Alexa Koenig]: Not at all. There’s a psychologist that we have worked with, um, two psychologists actually, who are based for a while in Istanbul, and their theory is that anxiety comes from having a lack of a sense of control over something awful. And that depression comes from having a lack of a sense of hope. And so a lot of what we’re trying to do right now, both with our student teams, but also through a professional training program that we have that trains journalists and work crimes investigators all over the world, is to think through how do we help to empower people to have a greater sense of control over things about which you might feel really helpless, like what’s happening in Iran today? And then how do we help? People to have a sense of hope that things can get better on the control piece. I think that’s where having that active engagement with these issues, having greater control over your social media feeds, having greater control over whether you know that something is authentic versus some form of propaganda or something that’s been developed by ai, I think that can be a really powerful force for moving forward.
[Miriam Reichenberg]: You also bring up this term in the book, transformative resilience. And you pose a question, um, how can we confront cruelty without becoming numb or overwhelmed? And that’s definitely something I feel like I grapple with in my everyday life. Like, I wanna stay informed but sometimes it’s too much. So you’ve kinda touched on this already, but
could you point to 3 strategies that might be helpful in managing a response to graphic imagery?
[Alexa Koenig]: Yeah, absolutely. I think the first is giving yourself permission not to look for a lot of the people that we’ve worked with who are very social justice minded. There is this sense of obligation, like, you know, who am I? My, we interviewed someone for the book who said, who am I to be brushing my teeth and putting my kids to bed when people’s children are being killed? And. Name the conflict, um, and that they felt that they should not put down the phone or not. Or if you’re a student, not stop investigating this thing because who are they to live lives that are relatively comfortable compared to what other people are suffering. Um, so I think letting that go and recognize it’s, we often use the oxygen mask analogy where if you’re on a plane and the oxygen masks drop, they always advise you to put on your own mask before trying to help the child next to you. I think that’s very similar here is to give yourself an understanding that there is almost a responsibility to be resilient in these cases. And that means cutting yourself some slack. Mm-hmm. And not feeling like you have to be, um, aware of every horrible thing happening in the world. The other is the awareness piece of understanding when you are beginning to be, um, overwhelmed, and there’s a few different tells. I think for people, sometimes it’s just a gut instinct of, oh my God, I can’t stop doom scrolling and I don’t know what’s going on to I am not sleeping well, or I’m drinking more than usual. Or if you have children, I’m snapping at my kids, or I’m snapping at my friends, or I’m withdrawing from social life. I think all of those are moments that people can reflect and go, how do I actually become more connected with people in this moment? And it’s often putting down your phone and going out and hanging out with other human beings in a very analog context. Um, the third is, if you know you’ve been sent something graphic or gonna watch something graphic, please don’t do it at night in your bed. We know that there are associations that you can then create where, um, maybe you’re tying one of your safest places to something really horrific. Also, you don’t wanna watch it right before you go to sleep, so if you can do it during the daytime and a bright sunny day, buy a window. That would be the ideal scenario. Other things like we looked into the social science research and the psychological research around a lot of this, a lot of the emotional resonance in a video is in the audible audio content. So even keeping sound down when you watch a video to minimize just that, um, pang of somebody pleading for their life or crying for their parent, um, that can make a big difference. Or if you’re watching something on YouTube, I’ll just give one more tip or trick, um, to sco kind of comb through thumbnails or of the video before you watch the whole video. Because that will prepare your brain for what you’re about to see if you, we often talk about it in terms of reverse engineering the movies in the mo, the movies want you to feel like you’re at the center of the action, like the action is actually happening to you. And to do that, they turn up the sound really loud. They make a really big picture on the screen. Um, this is about trying to make the image as small as you need for whatever purpose you’re looking, the sound as low as you need, and maybe even slowing down your playback. To like half speed or doubling it up to double speed so that you are telling your brain, this is not real life, this is not happening right now and I am not being traumatized myself. Um, but this is something I’m choosing to look at.
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[Erin Foster]: You just heard from Alexa Koenig, scholar, lawyer, and human rights advocate. Alexa is faculty director of the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center and Director of HRC’s Investigations Program. During this episode of Berkeley Brainwaves, we spoke with Alexa about the role of the Human Rights Center as well as the methods of coping with secondary trauma that we might experience in our exposure to graphic media/imagery in our everyday lives. In the next episode of Berkeley Brainwaves, the conversation continues with Alexa and we are joined by HRC Investigations Lab Team Leads, Berkeley undergraduates, Maneh Davityan and Talia Harter, to discuss the work of the HRC’s Investigations Lab and their recent investigation into CECOT, the notorious Salvadorean prison. Join us next time!
