Neda, martyrdom and the media event: Death imagery as an iconic memory

The Poster, 
Volume 3 Issue 1-2,
 http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=21478/

Abstract;


Death imagery online is a conflicted area of examination. At times it can assume a virality that will change public opinion creating iconic moments where death functions as a transformative device. The Internet with its ineradicable features to preserve content makes death a performance that can be consumed stripped of time and space. Death imagery becomes immortalized on the Internet defying the physical mortality of the body as a site of decay and decomposition. This article examines the death of Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran, exploring the entwined notions of witnessing and how the death event courted virality, immortalizing Neda as a global icon. The Internet became a site of double articulation where the act of dying was both contemporaneous and historical – captured, disseminated and consumed non-stop on the Internet. This temporal dislocation of the Internet means death as a media event can be both banalized as part of popular culture and equally consigned to the iconic; igniting affective communities that can domesticate death for collective grieving, communion and agency.

 Neda Agha-Soltan grave site in Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in Iran. Attribution:By Arashnikkhah (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Self-representation and the disaster event: self-imaging, morality and immortality

Moral Limits of Self-Representation and Disaster Sites

My paper published in the Journal of Media Practice 16(3) entitled, Self-representation and the disaster event: self-imaging, morality and immortality, examines the ethics of capturing and imaging the self against disaster sites.

 

 

Abstract, 

There's growing interest in the notion of the ‘selfie’ in the digital age. Much of the interest has been making sense of this digital genre pervasive in its manifestation while implicating the individual and hinging on public gaze in digital platforms. As a form of self-representation, the selfie reveals the complex interplay of identity politics and self-curation where the self is amenable to multiple iterations of public gaze. This article, drawing on this complex interplay, inspects a specific phenomenon in this selfie culture where there is a tendency to picture oneself against the scene of trauma or tragedy. The ‘disaster selfie’ or ‘disaster porn’ as a particular genre invokes questions of the moral limit in the objectification and aestheticisation of self. This article explores the moral politics of disaster selfies, the role of the abject and our quest for immortality where these invoke a wider crisis for visuality and image ethics online.

Copies at link, http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/jgFKhGFYTNpzcgdFnYHH/full