Technology and the Local Community: Uses of Drones in #NoDAPL Movement and Dandora Dumpsite Storytelling

Abstract

This article aims to explore the connection between drones and alternative journalistic narratives for local communities. Starting from the frame of digital technologies domestication, we explore how UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) could allow mediated practices of mobilization and resistance. By adopting an exploratory approach, we considered two case studies of drone journalism related to specific community issues that share similar characteristics of social inequalities and environmental risks and analyzed the journalistic work by Digital Smoking Signal, related to the #NoDAPL protests, and the African skyCAM reconstruction of the Dandora dumpsite in Kenya. As a result, we are able to show how the appropriation and use of drones can help communities to highlight some underinvestigated social issues. The analysis underlines two different ways of using drone technology to support the local community’s narrative, based on the level of involvement of the journalists in the community cause itself.

Keywords

drone journalism digital media activism local community #NoDAPL Dandora dumpsite

Media Activism, Journalism, and the Domestication of Drone Technology: Introduction and Literature Review

This article deals with the role of drone technology in giving voice to more fragile communities. We suppose that drones could provide materials to assist community-based storytelling both in journalistic and media activist grassroots practices, and enable situated and marginalized communities to take voice by considering its members “as actors engaged in the comprehension and ‘doing’ of community problem solving directed to social progress” (Stillman & Linger, 2009, p. 256). The technical characteristics and functions of drones are heterogeneous: some can be large or medium, while others are micro- or nano-sized, flying at different altitudes and carrying objects over short or longer distances (Bergtora Sandvik & Gabrielsen Jumbert, 2017). This technology is deeply rooted in its military origins, and often connected with surveillance and privacy issues (Andrejevic, 2015). Nevertheless, in the past decade, drones have turned from military to civilian products, for both professional/public and personal/private use. Lighter and smaller devices, combined with more accessible features often controlled remotely by smartphones and low prices have all contributed to the increase in sales of drones, fostering its use in the public and domestic sphere (e.g., entertainment, agriculture, emergency health services, urban planning, gaming, baby monitoring).

Because of their vertical spatiality and movement autonomy, drones also allow the conjuncture of above and below as a public space (Tuck, 2018); its qualities and properties suggest journalistic, civic, and activist purposes. The expansion of the possible uses (and users) of drone technology allows (but is not limited to) support for news-making and protest participation, which seems to exploit its hardware and software potential. The starting assumption for this study is that use of “drones for good” (Choi-Fitzpatrick, 2014) by (citizen) journalists or (media) activists, both in environmental activism and dronalism (Goldberg et al., 2013), could produce a reversal of the perspective of mainstream narratives. In particular, it could help local communities and its members carry out journalistic investigations, reveal abuses of power/authority, and highlight issues not yet covered by traditional media outlets. Both scholars and journalists emphasized this role of drone technology in community contexts: Gynnild and Uskali (2018, p. 12) describe drone technology in journalism as a “disruptive innovation,” which will soon be “a natural and ubiquitous part of our lives.” (see also Goldberg et al., 2013; Gynnild, 2014); africanDRONE believes that the flying robots “give citizens powerful new ways to understand their world better and to improve public accountability,”¹ and Rafsky (2017) considers Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) employment in “documentation, storytelling and advocacy purposes” as an “important lessons as drones increasingly become part of the documentation toolkit” for journalists and activists. Ntalakas et al. (2017, p. 187) sustain that “the use of drones during conflicts, civil unrest and environmental disasters is a proof that drone-generated content can be a valuable tool to tell a story”; Ben Kreimer (2018, p. 92) observes that drones and the data they produce as journalistic tools “enlighten and reveal stories by taking audiences into inaccessible spaces, capturing surprising visuals, and opening up new perspectives.”

UAVs many latest applications—its private and independent use—suggest that they have entered into a process of domestication (Perrit & Sprague, 2017). The notion of domestication refers to a sociocultural practice concerning the ways people appropriate communication technologies into their lives. Domestication theory (Lie & Sørensen, 1996; Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992) takes into consideration both the materiality and the meanings of technology and how the user integrates and adapts it into their daily practice, as well as describing how the technology produces a change in the household environment for the people who live there. As part of the broader social shaping of technology approach (Williams & Edge, 1996), domestication also involves the internet and digital technologies and devices (Bakardjieva, 2005). Over time, this process challenges conventions, power mechanisms and roles in everyday life and the public sphere, and ascribes a pivotal role to users and communities in innovation and the practice of technology sensemaking. As Baym (2015) suggests, technology affects social practices by affordances and constraints, preconditions and unintended consequences, and society itself affects technology and its development, in part because of the cultural practices of its users.

The domestication framework was initially conceived concerning the introduction of technologies in the household. The potential to apply this framework to the social sphere appears implicit since its first elaboration, as we can consider the whole process of domestication as a negotiation between users and media technologies—a process acting as a continuous coproduction of meanings strictly related to the social and communicative spheres. Accordingly, both the four stages of the process (acquiring, placing, interpreting, and integrating) and the entire domestication framework may be applied far beyond their initial domain of observation (the household). Through successive steps in the domestication process of drone technology, we have thus moved from a first adoption for private use, characterized by a playful approach, to the employment for the public, community, and political purposes—from the domestic flight in backyards to the public flight in contentious contexts and “social battlegrounds.”

Method and Sources of the Exploratory Research

We select the #NoDAPL movement and Dandora dumpsite case studies to investigate the use of drone technology in local communities for social and environmental issues. #NoDAPL is the protest movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), whose construction damaged Native American sacred territories, harming their historical memory, as well as causing negative externalities for the environment and the health of the local community. The latter example refers to the territory of the Dandora landfill in Nairobi, Kenya, considered one of the largest and most polluted dumpsites on the planet. This perspective focuses on the process of cultural appropriation of drones as tools that allow specific mediated practices of mobilization and resistance, aimed at protest or increase of awareness. We contextualize the two case studies starting from the broader concept of drone journalism, as news coverage and data collection for journalistic purposes through UAVs technology. Gynnild and Uskali define it as the “innovative processing that occurs at the intersection between journalism and data technology” (Gynnild, 2014, p. 715, as cited in Gynnild & Uskali, 2018, p. 7) and “computational exploration in journalism refers to the experimental collection and selection as well as the dissemination of algorithmic data by new technologies” (Gynnild & Uskali, 2018, p. 7). Given the characteristics of the technology concerning responsible drone journalism, information must be provided to users which sets out clear, correct, and ethical safety instructions to ensure the safety of the operator and those near the drone, both on the ground and in the air (Goldberg et al., 2013; Waite & Kreimer, 2016).

The novelty of drone journalism related to local community issues prompted us to take an exploratory approach to the theme. As Swelberg (2018) suggests, this approach “consists of an attempt to discover something new and interesting, by working your way through a research topic” (p. 2). Starting from the concept of domestication, and observing the adoption of the drone technology, we tried to answer two questions: how people used drones and what results they obtained, both regarding alternative forms of journalistic storytelling (and counterinformation) as well as in terms of giving voice to community purposes. We consider drone technology as a tool that can enhance community-based narratives by referring to the framework of digital storytelling (Paul & Fiebich, 2002), whose main elements are media, action, relationship, context, and communication. We will see further how these elements intertwine with our case studies; here, we highlight some specific characteristics of digital storytelling: it is decentralized, fluid, interactive, and not linear but multimedial and transmedial. These features enable the creation of original, independent narratives outside the centralized mainstream media logic. The framework of digital storytelling allows us to take into consideration, and connect, some revealing concepts such as “community voice” or “lack of media coverage,” which point out, in the activists and dronalists discourse, community claims. For example, in the #NoDAPL case study, drone technology allowed the Native American communities to describe the protests from their perspective, thus giving voice to that concerns of the community position, since it was not enough represented in the mainstream media. Or, in the case of Dandora dumpsite, the use of drones permitted African skyCAM journalists to independently map the territory of the landfill, providing new and unique information about it—compared with traditional reporting.

We reconstructed the case studies through secondary research, reviewing available data and gaining information from a wide range of sources—academic literature, journalistic texts, reports,² social media profile and audio–video reportage. Wherever possible, we also used informal qualitative approaches (conversations with an expert from African skyCAM).

We found far more academic sources and information on the #NoDAPL case study than on that of the Dandora dumpsite (Deem, 2018; Rafsky, 2017; Tuck, 2018; Walker & Walter, 2018). We selected 24 journalistic articles, 11 from international newspapers (The Guardian, Mother Jones, AlJazeera, Vox, and NPR) and 13 from local sources, more specifically from territorial communities or minority groups (National Post, Fusion, West Dakota Fox, and Society for Cultural Anthropology). We added the observation of Digital Smoke Signals (www.digitalsmokesignals.com) website with its social media accounts (Facebook: Digital Smoke Signals, Twitter: @MyronDewey). From these sources, a substantially homogeneous narrative emerges between international and local newspapers as far as the chronology of facts is concerned. Predictably, local and niche sources provide more insights on reporting the point of view of local communities, interviewing, for example, members of the Standing Rock community (Javier, 2016) or focusing on the solidarity among activists (Jegroo, 2016). Finally, the observation of Digital Smoke Signal’s social media accounts was particularly useful to provide further confirmation of the facts reported in the various publications and to verify the reporting activity.

As far as the Dandora dumpsite case is concerned, we found less academic research (Kameri-Mbote & Muriungi, 2017; Odongo & Rodriques, 2016; Onyari, 2017). We selected 18 sources divided as follows: 6 journalistic articles from international newspapers (The Guardian, AlJazeera, and The National), 2 nongovernmental organizations reports, and 10 video documents related both to the Dandora dumpsite and to the work of African skyCAM. Given the difficulty in finding additional material associated with this second case study, we managed to have a conversation with Dickens Onditi Olewe,³ the African skyCAM’s founder, which meant we could collect useful information for the reconstruction of the case study. By exchanging with Dickens Onditi Olewe about the main challenges and the additional values of using drones for journalistic purposes, as well as about his work related to the Dandora dumpsite and the collaboration with Ben Kreimer,⁴ we were able to deepen our knowledge of the means of investigating a potential story with UAVs, to discover the context of Kenyan news reporting (frequent journalistic topics and issues, laws and flying regulations, and the state-of-the-art drone technology), and better understand the different stages of the visual storytelling and the construction of the 3D model of Dandora’s dumpsite. For instance, Dickens Onditi Olewe recalls that one of the values of drone technology is to help journalists avoid hazards and reduce safety risks during critical operations or unconventional coverage, but also to maintain editorial independence while investigating a potential story with personal gear instead of flying with governmental helicopters. Even if this informal conversation has revealed further topics interesting to debate, we decided to keep the focus on our main question.

The following sections suggest a framework to contextualize #NoDAPL movement and Dandora dumpsite and try to underline the use of drones to support the local community issues.

#NoDapl Movement: From the Protest to the (Re)creation of a Community

Scenario

The DAPL is an underground oil pipeline that crosses four states in the United States. The project planning started in June 2014, and the construction which began in March 2016 was completed by April 2017. From the beginning of the project, indigenous natives and environmental activists from all over the country expressed their opposition to the pipeline, and in particular, their concern about the impact on the waters of Lake Oahe and Missouri River as well as the potential damage to sacred lands of Native Americans. The DAPL project was finally approved in March 2016, and the building began immediately, however, dissent against the pipeline quickly grew. During the spring and summer of 2016, the protests merged into a massive grassroots movement, often labelled as #NoDAPL. By August 2016, thousands of activists, who called themselves the Water Protectors, moved to the camp of Standing Rock, as the center of resistance. There, as reported by journalist Carla Javier, people started seeing each together as a real community, with shared roles and duties, such as providing food for the protesters (Javier, 2016).

Environmental activists, celebrities, military veterans, ordinary citizens, and activists from the #BlackLivesMatter movement joined the protesters (Jegroo, 2016). Between September and December 2016 several protests took place, which often created periods of intense tension and clashes between the protesters and the police. The protest reached a peak on the evening of November 20th, 2016, when demonstrators attempted to make their way across Backwater Bridge, declaring that the closure of the bridge was an obstacle to allowing vehicles into the camp, especially in case of a medical emergency. The authorities claimed that the bridge was closed for security reasons and wanted to stop the activists, so they attacked them with water cannons, teargas, rubber bullets, and concussion grenades. According to the Indigenous Environmental Network, more than 160 protesters were injured in just one night (Wong, 2016). By the end of 2016, the activists began to leave Standing Rock camp due to the adverse weather conditions during the winter. On January 24th 2017, President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum to advance the construction of the pipeline, which was then completed by April 2017 (Baker & Davenport, 2017).

Mainstream Media Coverage and the Role of Drone Journalism

The #NoDAPL movement was covered both by local, national, and international news, especially during the past few months of the protest. Despite the extensive media coverage, the native voices were often ignored (Monet, 2017). In their research, Walker and Walter analyze two of the major American news media, The New York Times and Fox News, providing evidence that they were both able to frame the movement as something to which the average reader could relate. Although the narrative of the #NoDAPL movement given by the two news media was different, both were lacking on “historicizing the colonial legacy of land dispossession, genocide and racism against First Peoples” (Walker & Walter, 2018, p. 414). Amy Goodman, from Democracy Now!, covered the #NoDAPL movement from the beginning of the protest. She underlined how the Standing Rock claims started to gain the mainstream attention only months after the beginning of the protests:

[it was] astounding how little coverage they [the Water Protectors] have gotten over these months. . . . And yet these protests have only intensified, the resistance camps have only grown over the months, without the media megaphone of the corporate media. (AlJazeera, 2016)

The Standing Rock protests were covered by the mainstream just as the dissent intensified and as the clashes between police and activists began. Under these circumstances, the #NoDAPL activists and journalists began to use drone technology to report facts and actions.

On the evening of November 20th, the Water Protectors decided to take action and the police responded in a brutal fashion. Even though the event was widely documented, live-streamed and shared via social media, both the local and the national media were absent. Among the protestors was Myron Dewey, a journalist and founder of Digital Smoke Signals,⁵ an indigenous media platform,

was capturing the scene from above with his drone and sharing it on Facebook Live. The footage, which clearly showed torrents of water falling on protesters, has had over a million views on Facebook and was used to challenge statements by law enforcement suggesting the water cannons were primarily used to put out fires. (Rafsky, 2017)

Sara Rafsky reported that many native journalists and activists were advocates of drone technology, which was crucial to illustrate the Standing Rock protests from an indigenous perspective.

During the Standing Rock protest, drones were used to film both people and land. Initially, as pointed out by Rafsky, the camera maintained a steady presence over the people, documenting clashes between protesters and security forces, and showing the use of water cannons against the activists. Subsequently, “The drone footage made a visually compelling case for the preservation of a place marked by environmental and traditional significance for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe” (Rafsky, 2017, p. 4). This is particularly relevant since native voices are often ignored by mainstream news media, even in narratives which support the #NoDAPL movement, which focused on the environmental aspects as well as the Native Americans and environmental activists teaming up against the oil companies. But for native tribes, it was more than an environmental issue as it concerned their traditions and history (Campbell, 2017).

The Standing Rock case illustrates how drone-based technology implemented a journalistic narrative alternative to mainstream storytelling and helped the community reassert a collective identity and give voice to a public issue. Thanks to the aerial footage produced by Myron Dewey, the activists were able to demonstrate the violent use of water cannons by police and counter the dominant narrative that labelled their protests as “riots”: those images spread through social media, capturing national and international attention, outside mainstream media. In doing so, Native Americans activated a “performative” protest (Butler, 2015), expressed in both offline and online dimensions. Indeed, through the domestication of drone technology, they not only managed to demonstrate the actual course of events during the protests but also to convey their narrative, countering the colonial sight (Deem, 2018).

Dandora Dumpsite Between Contradictions and Innovative Digital Storytelling

Scenario

The Dandora landfill is one of the 50 largest dumpsites in the world. This sprawling “open-air dump” of 32 acres, located right at the heart of the slums of Korogocho, Baba Ndogo, Mathare, and Dandora, was established in 1975 with funds from Nairobi City Council and the World Bank. The initiative aimed at “offering a higher standard of housing” (Onyari, 2017). Problems began outside the dumping location when it had officially reached its limit by 2001, and yet it continues to operate. Shortly afterward, Dandora, along with other slums, turned into a vast dumpsite where the industrial and domestic waste of Nairobi piled up.

With currently 8 million residents, “no African city is more poised to become a testbed for change than East Africa’s centre for innovation and globally connected capital of Kenya–Nairobi” (Malan & De Merindol, 2016, p. 4). Also, in the Special Report for #closedumpsites (Onyari, 2017), Nairobi is seen as a “capital with significant international connections, housing the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP).” The report recognizes that “some of the key health issues in the region are caused by the dumping of toxic waste. Every day, more than 2,000 metric tonnes of waste is dumped on this site.” As a result of the overload of garbage, a large part of it is deposited and ends up in the Nairobi River, which passes through Dandora and pollutes the water, making it toxic for people who bathe in and drink it.

Paradoxically, the dumpsite is considered the best solution for everyone since poor families obtain food from there and scavenge for materials to sell to the recyclers. Jared Onyari (2017) uses the concept of “social dilemma” to underline the vicious circle from which it is difficult for marginalized people to escape. Dumping in Dandora is unrestricted and includes industrial, agricultural, domestic, and medical waste. By 2012, the City Council of Nairobi decommissioned the dumpsite. The conflict with the Kenya Airports Authority over the relocation of the dumpsite to Ruai, notwithstanding, came to a grinding halt. The community is not able to imagine an easy end to these violations to human rights and environmental health in Kenya. According to Kameri-Mbote and Muriungi’s (2017) recommendations, in which, they also refer to the success of the Kenya National Spatial Data Infrastructure model illustrated by Odongo and Rodriques (2016), the use of drones “in support of the development of a more reliable national land information system is only possible through the prudent use of information and communication technologies, and drones need to be among the ICTs used.”

Drone Journalism: Areal Videos and 3D Model of Nairobi’s Dandora Dumpsite

In 2012, African skyCAM⁶ was born as Africa’s first UAS (unmanned aircraft systems) journalism team. The project created by the Kenyan journalist Dickens Onditi Olewe⁷, and funded by Africa News innovation challenge,⁸ aimed at frontline reporting and upheld editorial independence in the continent. Until then, the only way for journalists to collect aerial footage required a ride in police helicopter which might constitute a threat to their reporting independence. Two years later, the collaboration between Dickens Onditi Olewe and Ben Kreimer has led to the creation of innovative narratives about the Dandora dumpsite. Indeed, the drone used by African skyCAM has served to capture video and aerial images from above to offer a full immersion experience through storytelling that allowed a large number of people to discover and react to the controversial dumpsite in Nairobi. Such footage illustrates how people on the lower socioeconomic scale live and work inside the dump, exposing their health to tremendous pollution with the hope of selling recycled waste.

What is unique to this use of drones, compared with other cases, is the creation of a three-dimensional model⁹ of the Dandora dumpsite. Transforming the data collected from the camera attached to the drone into a 3D virtual environment can help media advisers explore the space created in order to take part in the storytelling process and learn more about the illustrated problem. Beyond the experiential value that emphasizes the stories told, digital visualizations can represent a demonstration of the strength of drone technology in constructing alternative and innovative narratives on complex topics. Moreover, the 3D virtual model uploaded on Sketchfab, the largest platform to publish and find 3D models online for free, provides not only an overview of the dumpsite area size but also draws up an inventory of waste management issues in the neighborhoods surrounding Dandora. The 3D visualization realized by Ben Kreimer, lead advisor for African skyCAM, can be considered as Open Data since it is available to journalists and citizens through free navigation. For instance, by visualizing the position of an elementary school (which shares a wall with the dumpsite), the housing area with people living in the heart of the dump and the dumping activity, it is possible for media consumers to learn more about this issue, as drone journalism provides an additional and (previously unavailable) unique perspective about this story compared to traditional editorial reporting.

During the drone reporting for the video and the collection of data to create the three-dimensional model, African skyCAM did not have any difficulty in receiving legal permits to shoot footage. In January 2015, against all the odds, the Kenyan government banned all drone activity, which meant the end of African skyCAM. It is essential to underline the fact that some variables change according to the geographical location, the general and specific background, the way we use these flying robots and the seriousness of the issue at the expense of the potential of drones as a technological tool. These factors affect the outcomes and the kind of impact that such technology would be able to produce. The lack of a concrete solution and the increasingly rigid regulation concerning the use of drones opens the door for many global nongovernmental organizations, activists, journalists, and dronists to continue the protest through social and environmental advocacy, media investigations, social media campaign such as #closedumpsites.¹⁰ Moreover, Olewe and other African drone activists agreed on the creation of the #africanDRONE, a sort of coalition to lobby for more progressive laws and to prove that drones have the potential do to public good as they contribute to building knowledge, which is considered in itself a benefit to society (Stigliz, 1999). The coalition hosted the first of a planned series of community meetups in Lagos (Nigeria) and plans additional meetings in Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. In recent years, the Kenya Flying Labs, a robotics knowledge hub, has committed to focusing on solving local challenges and needs via the use of appropriate robotics and AI technologies. For this hub “robots, such as drones, and the data they allow to acquire and solutions they propose can create the same impact in a responsible and meaningful way for the social good sector in Kenya by creating local robotics capacity.”¹¹

Technology and the Community: Learning From #NoDAPL and Dandora Case Studies

The analysis of the two case studies—both related to environmental issues, regarding the damages of lands and the severe consequences for the people that live there—seems to highlight that being able to give evidence of often dramatic situations through images, footage, and data extrapolated from drones represents an element of advantage for local communities. In the #NoDAPL case, it would be impossible to gain a full overview of the clashes between police and protesters as well as of the lands involved in the construction of the pipeline. Likewise, without UAV, it would be difficult to map the Dandora dumpsite’s territory and use that data to build the 3D model. As pointed out, this article aims to understand how drone technology can convey forms of community-based narrative or alternative storytelling. As discussed in the second paragraph, we mainly refer to the framework of digital storytelling and its fundamental elements; in this section, we will relate them to our case studies.

Concerning the context, the reconstruction of the two case studies pointed out a significant difference: several news media articles about Standing Rock take into account the #NoDAPL community’s point of view. At the time, we were not able to find original statements from those living in Dandora’s community. A further observation attested that journalists reporting on Standing Rock were also Native Americans, activists, and members of the #NoDAPL movement, whereas professionals covering the dumpsite were not part of the Dandora community. This is an important point since we were asking about the use of drones and the results obtained for community purposes. In this regard, it should be underlined that the use of drone technology is not as easy as it might seem, mainly due to flying regulations, which are not always clear and differ from state to state. We have seen how, in the Dandora dumpsite case, the laws regarding the use of UAVs hardly changed after the work undertaken by African skyCAM, and something similar happened at Standing Rock (Koebler, 2016): this presents a problematic aspect, as these objects are freely available on the market, both for public and private use.

The elements of media and communication play a central role in this process. Dukowitz (2017) suggests that news organizations and worldwide press agencies—such as CNN, BBC, Reuters, The Washington Post, AFP, and Time—are often the first to be granted special flight permissions by government bodies, which is significant because it sets a precedent for future uses and users. By acting as a trusted, reputable, and responsible agent reading the use of drone flights, news organizations could help create a possible path forward for other, smaller organizations to obtain similar permissions. Following this logic, local and independent media would take advantage of extensive but responsible use of drones in news reporting. However, as we have briefly seen on the #NoDAPL case study, this step is still a long way off and the “laws of the sky” work differently for large organizations, independent media outlets and “ordinary people.” Therefore, although drone technology is now widespread throughout civil society, an awareness of the critical use of this medium is still problematic for the general public.

From this perspective, it is possible to outline two different ways of using drone technology for community purposes—or, still referring to the digital storytelling framework elements, the action—where the most significant concerns the level of involvement of community members. In the #NoDAPL movement, we identify a bottom–up dynamic since there are some members of the grassroots movement who collectively convey the storytelling. This narrative, spread mainly through independent media and social networks, has been implemented and strengthened by the footage collected using drones, thus challenging the mainstream narrative and giving voice to the instances of the community. On the contrary, the Dandora dumpsite analysis suggests the appearance of a top–down dynamic. Even if the founder of African skyCAM was resident in Nairobi, he is not part of the Dandora dumpsite community itself. In essence, he visited Dandora to map the territory and denounce its state of degradation by using different tools, including drone technology. Still as far as we are concerned, it is indisputable that the commitment of African skyCAM, many media activists and civil society has been essential to highlight the dramatic situation of the Dandora dumpsite. However, the paradox of closing the dumpsite would be bound to have some economic impact on local community workers: if we consider that most of Dandora’s residents earn money from recycling and selling waste, their activity sadly depends on the existence of Dandora dumpsite (Onyari, 2017). There are apparent consequences regarding alternative forms of journalistic storytelling for community purposes. Looking at the flux and the relationship between mainstream narrative and alternative storytelling, we can see two different outputs emerging from the two cases. The Standing Rock issues spread internationally mainly thanks to efforts of the Native Americans and #NoDAPL community in covering the protests and providing a different storytelling. It worked, because after a while, even mainstream media started using native language and points of view (Monet, 2017). Moreover, Myron Dewey codirected “Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock,”¹² a 2017 award-winning documentary which really “tells the story of the NoDAPL movement and the native-led peaceful resistance.”¹³ The movie was broadcast on Netflix, reaching an international audience. The case of Dandora, on the other hand, did not have an equally significant and widespread media impact; this was most likely because the dumpsite has not merged into a social, urban, or environmental movement. Indeed, the construction of the 3D model means that the community (the citizens of the Kenyan capital) have been given the chance to learn more about the state of the dumpsite in Dandora.

From Drone Domestication to a New Digital Inequality? Some Closing Remarks

This article aimed to introduce new elements into the debate about the use of UAVs technology for community purposes, especially with regard to the increase in awareness and the mediated practices of mobilization and resistance. We used the concept of domestication to inquire how Information and Communication Technology, such as drones, could contribute to building public discourse and shared meaning through alternative journalistic narrative practices. We started out with an exploratory approach, beginning with the reconstruction and observation of two examples of what concerns the possible, different outcomes related to responsible drone journalism. The case studies gave us some useful elements to help us understand how drone technology can support community purposes, with a view on alternative forms of journalistic storytelling. In the #NoDAPL movement, drones represent a fundamental element to convey a community narrative outside the mainstream logic. The case of Dandora’s dumpsite highlights some elements of originality in the technological use of the medium, thanks to the digital mapping of the territory that allowed the construction of the 3D model. Concerning the results achieved for community purposes, we pointed out that the main difference concerns the level of involvement of journalists in the community of reference, which consequently outlines two different dynamics, one bottom–up and the other top–down.

As media scholars, we are aware of the power of persuasive storytelling, such as the tools which enhance it. Nonetheless, these tools are not always accessible to communities in the so-called digital divide (Selwyn, 2004); and even though low prices and ease of use may allow large-scale adoption of this technology, a new, complex divide regarding productive uses and the digital skills (van Dijck, 2005), which takes the form of digital inequality (DiMaggio & Hargittai, 2001). We are therefore trying to ascertain if drone technology, interpreted in the frame of drone journalism, could help fill the gap.

As one of many instances that illustrate the role of journalists, we recall that “freedom of expression is most often interpreted as the right for freely conveying information, opinion, ideas, and images. In many situations, access to information may become an even more crucial factor for journalism” (Lauk et al., 2016). Moreover, as the case studies of #NoDAPL and Dandora have shown, drone technology allows the highlighting of some underinvestigated social issues, thereby helping to access pieces of information related to people’s living conditions. Also, we can hypothesize that the problem of the digital divide is still widespread, both concerning technical expertise and knowledge about regulation. It reaffirms the need for more critical use of drone technology outside commercial exploitation, both for ordinary citizens and (alternative) media outlets.

The use of drone technology continues to face large-scale challenges. For journalists and drone operators, the investigation and the requirement for telling the stories of marginalized people is a daily mission. While we do not pretend to claim that the role of journalists or drone operators is necessary to solve conflicts, the use of the technology surely allows the outlining of their origins, the features of the context, the people involved, the consequences and the impacts by favoring different perspectives and a change of attitude.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Gaia Casagrande is PhD candidate at the Department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome. Her research interests concern internet and media studies, Internet critical theory, journalism studies, digital technology.

Mohamed Amine Khaddar is PhD candidate at the Department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome. His research interests include digital communication and social media, internet and cultural mutations, journalism and media studies, Mediterranean studies, social innovation.

Stefania Parisi, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome, where teaches Digital Media and Communication Theory and Audience Studies. Her research topics focus on internet and digital platforms theory, social movements and media activism, urban space and cultures, feminist studies.

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