You may be in the middle of a revolution and you don't even know it.

Think back to the indelible TV images from the World Trade Center megabombings on September 11th, 2001. The ones you remember were all amateur images from amateur cameras.

From Rodney King to Osama Bin Laden, handicams aren't just for weddings and family vacations anymore.

As British filmmaker Lesley Woodhead points out in our film, camcorders may be causing the greatest upheaval since the Industrial Revolution. The first handicam was invented in 1985 by a team led by Shoji Nemoto, an engineer who is now president of SONY's 'personal imaging division'. But few manufacturers are aware of the positive re-purposing their gadgets can undergo in the service of social change.

Human rights activists, international war crimes investigators, neo-right videographers, and anti-corporate movements are arming themselves with the tools of this new visual-revolution. Brave new video vérité interventions around the world are quickly advancing the struggle for truth, justice and universal rights.

Some of the images gathered by camcorder campaigners may only be for local community consumption; some amateur video documentation may result in changing national public policy and law; some of it ends up in human rights alerts on the net, educating a world about various issue-driven campaigns. Some camcorder material ends up as visible testimony at world courts and war-crimes tribunals. And some of it ends up filtered by independent journalists and mainstream broadcasters through to the world's most important news-nets.

One thing is clear for journalism: all these videoactivists move their respective audiences closer to the power of the 'real' story.

Inspired by Peter Gabriel's observation about the power of the Rodney King video, an important player in the digirevolution is Witness, an organization in New York which provides cameras to hundreds of local partners around the world. Witness organizers Gillian Caldwell and Sam Gregory believe that human rights groups can communicate more effectively if they are given the appropriate tools. The economics of the low-cost shooting and editing functions of the digital cameras facilitate this, making the 'first world / third world' digital divide into an electronic bridge connecting individual activists, communities and audiences together. Witness provides on-the-ground technical training and strategic support for these mediactivists, including access to newer technologies like the Web.

Most regular TV news viewers are becoming increasingly aware of the end results of this new-style handicam journalism. How has mainstream news-collecting been changed by the work of these 'on the ground' activists? What is the role of activism and advocacy in investigative journalism? And what about bias? Can we trust the ethics and motivations of human rights mediactivists any more or less than we trust the News?

Meanwhile, more and more, mainstream media is turning inwards to domestic issues. International interest and basic international news coverage in America has been cut in half in the last decade. The airwaves are shutting themselves off to 'foreign' factual content.

One could rationalize the neglect as compassion fatigue, or one too many televisual genocides filtering into, and disturbing, our consciences and our pursuit of pleasure and consumption. But what does tele-xenophobia mean for the public mind and the democratic discourse around open society? Such enclosure, exclusion and gate-keeping is evident around the televisual world. Of course, conventional images of the "war on terrorism", Afghanistan, Palestine and Kashmir have recently sensitized the public to the all-too-real world around them and the role of handicams. Perhaps a few news junkies and factual commissioners are beginning to look outward, but I am afraid such gaze will be transient and momentary.

Over the ages, our rights have evolved: freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right to information. Now, we must establish the right to communicate as a fundamental United Nations sanctioned human right. MediActivists around the world are working with digicams in the front-line trenches, defending individual rights, defining the collective rights of the communities they represent, and protecting and extending all of our rights. It is essential that we place the communication of rights and the right to communicate at the heart of social struggle and democracy. The right to communicate is a part of the struggle for greater dialogue, pluralism, tolerance, and participation.

The handicam revolution is about the power of audiences to become producers, i.e. producer-users, instead of passive receivers. The handicam revolution is turning the digital dream into a practical reality.

From an essay by Peter Wintonick with contributions from Katerina Cizek, both co-directors of SEEING is BELIEVING. The full essay appeared in The Guardian, London, England, summer 2002.