Cosmopolitan Dimensions of Virality and “The Boy in the Ambulance”

Abstract

In a context of globally networked social media, “viral” instances of collective affect and attention that coalesce around images of distant suffering merit consideration as significant moments of cosmopolitan expression. The case of Omran Daqneesh, the young Syrian “boy in the ambulance” whose photograph went viral in 2016, provides an instructive case study. Beginning with a quantitative assessment of the story’s diffusion and then tracing the trajectory of its viral diffusion and the affective response it produced as the image peaked and then subsided in public attention, analysis of the case illustrates how virality can articulate rhetorical cosmopolitanism, but also demonstrates the limits for political cosmopolitanism in producing sustained action.

Keywords:

• Cosmopolitanism
• Distant Suffering
• Iconic Images
• Social Media
• Twitter
• Virality

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Robert Rowland and the journal reviewers for their valuable feedback in this project; Patricia Riley, Henry Jenkins, and Manuel Castells for their comments on earlier versions; and Eric Lindberg for his editing assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. A version of this paper was presented at the annual National Communication Association conference in 2017.