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Abstract
Digital witnessing, our engagement with death through local participants’ own recordings of the conflict zone, introduces a new kind of death spectacle in the West: mediatized death [Mortensen, M. (2015). Journalism and eyewitness images. London: Routledge.]. Whilst, like past spectacles, this one also invites its publics to witness death as a moral event that requires a response, mediatized death differs from past spectacles, in that it injects into the practice of witnessing an accentuated sense of doubt: how do we know this is authentic? And, what should we feel towards it? This is because, given the multiple actors filming in conflict zones, digital witnessing breaks with the professional monopoly of the journalist and becomes a complex site of struggle where competing spectacles of death, each with their own interest, vie for visibility. How the status of the death spectacle and our potential engagement with it change under the weight of this new epistemic instability is the focus of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communication at the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on the communication of human suffering in a number of media genres, such as humanitarian appeals, celebrity advocacy, disaster news and war and conflict reporting. Relevant publications include Discourse in late modernity (1999, two editions), The spectatorship of suffering (2006, two editions), The soft power of war (ed., 2008) and The ironic spectator. Solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism (2013; Outstanding Book Award, ICA 2015). [email: [email protected]]
Notes
1. The term ‘amateur’ is here broadly used to refer to media content production and dissemination by various actors (civilian, military and local NGOs) who are not trained in the professional practices of institutional journalism – even though, as we will see, some of them, such as ISIS, are developing professionalized practices in their social media use – what Shane and Hubbard (Citation2014) call online jihad 3.0.
2. As a general point, professional war journalism of the twentieth century, beyond the embedded reporting of the Iraq wars (1991 and 2003), differed from today's, in that such earlier journalism fully subordinated amateur voice to the voice of the journalist, employing it exclusively to express the personal experience or opinion of the eyewitness rather than to convey newsworthy information; as such, amateur voice was not really central to the journalist's claims to truth, aiming primarily at mobilizing emotion and unifying audiences around the imagined community of the nation (for a discussion see Chouliaraki, Citationin press; Kampf & Liebes, Citation2013; see also Chouliaraki, Citation2013a for a comparison ofprofessional war photojournalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). As we shall see, however, contemporary journalism performs a parallel function, as the remediation of amateur recordings in Western platforms similarly attempts to recontextualize the emotional potential of these recordings as particular claims to authenticity that, rather than conveying any form of truth, primarily resonate with Western structures of feeling.
3. I here draw on and re-contextualize Papacharissi's use of ‘affective attunement’ as citizens’ use of hybrid digital spaces in ways that foreground the affective character of participation – ‘what Coleman (2013) has termed the feeling of being counted’ (Citation2015, p. 25).
4. These are The Independent, The Guardian, The Daily Mirror, The Sun, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail. The selection criteria for these press platforms are: high readership and influential coverage; inclusive of high- and low-brow readership; comprehensive spectrum of political positions.
6. All front pages of 4 October 2014 can be found here: http://www.thepaperboy.com/uk/2011/10/21/front-pages-archive.cfm
7. Such professionalized reflexivity is further reflected in, what we may call, ‘the semiotics of decapitation’ with the detainee wearing an orange jumpsuit and the executioner speaking with a British accent – both tactically staged visual signs that reverse Western norms of visibility (Guantanamo prisoners, native-spoken English as the official language of Western foreign policy) and challenge Western assumptions about the roles and power relationships of conflict reporting (for a discussion of the appeal of such ISIS’ propaganda strategies on Western audiences see Farwell, Citation2014).
8. All front pages of 4 October 2014 can be found here: http://www.thepaperboy.com/uk/2014/10/04/front-pages-archive.cfm
10. For instance, The Independent 5 October 2014; as discussed by The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/10/05/islamic-state-independent_n_5934086.html
12. All front pages of 22 August 2013 can be found here: http://www.thepaperboy.com/uk/2013/08/22/front-pages-archive.cfm The Sun: Boris bonking nus boss bedded broke brass (sex scandal exposed). Image: (No online headlines available — Showing BBC Headlines Instead for 22/08/2013).
13. The Daily Mirror, Thursday, 22 August 2013: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/syria-chemical-weapons-attack-children-2203679 The Daily Telegraph and The Sun’s online versions are no longer available.
14. The BBC license fee (The Daily Telegraph), a health supplements fraud (The Daily Mail) and a municipality of London sex scandal (The Sun).
15. In contrast, for instance, to the Peshawar victims in December 2014, which UK press personalized through individual portraits of each schoolchild: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/peshawar-attack-the-faces-of-the-innocent-children-killed-by-taliban-gunmen-9931606.html
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