IRMA-International.org: Creator of Knowledge
Information Resources Management Association
Advancing the Concepts & Practices of Information Resources Management in Modern Organizations

Bearing Witness through Technology: War and Visual Culture in a Converged World

Bearing Witness through Technology: War and Visual Culture in a Converged World
View Sample PDF
Author(s): Yasmin Ibrahim (Queen Mary, University of London, UK)
Copyright: 2011
Pages: 16
Source title: Global Media Convergence and Cultural Transformation: Emerging Social Patterns and Characteristics
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Dal Yong Jin (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-037-2.ch009

Purchase

View Bearing Witness through Technology: War and Visual Culture in a Converged World on the publisher's website for pricing and purchasing information.

Abstract

The convergence of technologies brings a two-fold phenomenon into our technologically mediated world. Firstly, mobile technologies have enabled the recording of war and conflict by bystanders who can then transmit their recordings to the wider world through the Internet. Secondly, this form of bearing witness creates a proliferation of images of suffering leading to a new visual economy that invites new types of spectatorship which reconfigure events and integrate them into mainstream and niche media platforms. This chapter argues that the aestheticization of suffering is a dominant and integral part of our culture and new media technologies illuminate and offer new ways to both engage with and commodify suffering. The commodification of suffering on video-streaming platforms on the Internet results in spaces of perverse obsession with pain and suffering but also performative counter-sites which offer different ways to record and narrate human suffering beyond the vantage point of mainstream media.

Related Content

Nitesh Behare, Rashmi D. Mahajan, Meenakshi Singh, Vishwanathan Iyer, Ushmita Gupta, Pritesh P. Somani. © 2024. 36 pages.
Shikha Mittal. © 2024. 21 pages.
Albérico Travassos Rosário. © 2024. 31 pages.
Carla Sofia Ribeiro Murteira, Ana Cristina Antunes. © 2024. 23 pages.
Mario Sierra Martin, Alvaro Díaz Casquero, Marina Sánchez Pérez, Bárbara Rando Rodríguez. © 2024. 17 pages.
Poornima Nair, Sunita Kumar. © 2024. 18 pages.
Neli Maria Mengalli, Antonio Aparecido Carvalho. © 2024. 16 pages.
Body Bottom