The vernacular of photobombing The aesthetics of transgression

This image taken in Wales in c.1853 is possibly the earliest example of a photobomb. By Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales from Wales/Cymru - Sally and Mrs Reed, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38812616

The banal imaging of ourselves and our environments has led to new aesthetic modes where the conventions of imaging, subject–object relationships and what is pleasurable or popular often draw on the ludic, the unexpected or the surprise element. One such image genre is photobombing, where a transgressive object or entity within a conventional image setting subverts it, adding popular appeal through its ability to reconfigure its aesthetic conventions, opening it up for public pleasure and consumption and inscribing it with a possibility of going viral. Photobombing as an image genre online reflects our aesthetic modes and the age of distraction, where the unexpected remains a mode of ocular appeal underscoring the convergence of popular culture and the fluidity of Web 2.0’s convergence architecture. As such, people’s aesthetic modes of the popular can be invented, renewed and subverted with new formats. The phenomenon of photobombing equally affirms the spectacular as a liminal site where pleasure is experienced with the breaking down of norms and the conjoining of a communal gaze through the aesthetics of transgression.

Convergence, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517743666

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354856517743666?journalCode=cona

Facebook and the Napalm Girl: Reframing the Iconic as Pornographic

By Pearson, CPL, Photographer; Post-Work by W.wolny [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Facebook’s banning of the photo of the iconic Napalm Girl before it was reinstated due to public criticism of the social networking facility was a symbolic and material act of incursion on the sacred. It underscored the prowess of the technology firm as a platform for content sharing from breaking news to banal images where millions of images are shared and integrated through networked relationships and its circulation economy, re-framing and re-configuring social memory, history and morality. More importantly, it asserted the “technological gaze” of Facebook where its system of managing content can turn the sacred into puerile and the puerile into popular entertainment, flattening, and re-mapping content through its own moral sensibilities. This Facebook economy imposes its own morality through its “technological gaze,” and in the process thwarts our “projects of memory” opening up wider ethical challenges for society and humanity.


Social Media and Society
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305117743140

Visuality and the ‘Jihadi-bride’ The re-fashioning of desire in the digital age

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture

Yasmin Ibrahim, Queen Mary, University of London

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2017.1381836

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504630.2017.1381836

By Philip Burne-Jones, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=353102

Abstract,

This paper examines the controversial figure of the ‘Jihadi Bride’ through her visual depictions in media discourses where she is associated with danger, conflict and the evil Other. Such depictions often draw heavily on the Orientalist gaze of the Middle East in conflict; its atavism, servitude of womanhood and the incongruence of religion for secular modernity. These media discourses equally draw on the imagination of the internet as a space for the loss of innocence and for luring the vulnerable into inexplicable darkness. This paper, by drawing on the concept of desire and its relationship to the screen as well as the concept of ‘new media visuality’ where pervasive consumption of imagery mediates reality and fantasy, as well as sexuality and the forbidden, argues that the Jihadi Bride is a product of modernity and not of doctrine. As a technological subject with an insatiable desire ignited through the screen, the Jihadi Bride is a consequence of modernity and its invocation of desire sustained through the screen. The Jihadi Bride is equally part of a mediated visuality where viral circulation and instant gratification reconfigure notions of proximity and intimacy, and straddles earthly desires with the ethereal.

50 Free copies at link,

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PkVpqYp4pw64Gx8K5pdZ/full

Revisiting Rousseau’s amour propre: Self-love and digital living

 Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication
Volume 8 Number 1, doi: 10.1386/ejpc.8.1.115_1




Abstract; 

By Maurice Leloir - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3913/3913-h/3913-h.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8745969

The digital culture of the Internet and the emergence of social networking sites online have made identity construction a salient aspect of this economy. It also signifies a ‘narcissistic turn’ with increasing emphasis on self-construction and self-love from social profiles, self-representations, self-search to ‘selfies’. The construction of ‘self’ online is mediated through the gaze of the others, this being an important validation in the construction of self. By drawing on Rousseau’s ‘amour propre’ the article examines how this concept is relevant in today’s digital culture and self narration online through everyday communication including imaging, uploading, tagging and ‘liking’ making others’ validation of us an important element of self-esteem. Rousseau’s notion of self-love has both constructive and destructive configurations and the article argues that these can take different manifestations online in today’scontemporary digital culture.

The re-aestheticisation of poverty: blogging hunger in the age of austerity

Yasmin Ibrahim

Social Identities

Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture

 

By New York Times Current History Magazine - Author, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10773923

 

This paper examines the re-aestheticisation of hunger and poverty with the emergence of austerity blogs. These blogs, which chronicle personal narratives while re-directing gaze in creating food through limited budgets and in sharing the intimate brutalities of hunger, bring a renewed focus and interest to poverty through daily lived experiences of hunger. Beyond personalising hunger in a climate of austerity, blogs as a symbol of articulation of the laypeople for the general public become interstitial spaces between government rhetoric and media representations, making poverty an intimate, personal and present proposition. Blogs as peoples’ archives of social history are hybrid spaces of personal iterations amenable to public consumption and media scrutiny. In the process these can re-mediate and disrupt the social reality of first-world hunger, inviting a gaze through first-hand narratives. Poverty becomes a contested entity online where blogs perform both resistance and reiteration of the neo-liberal stereotypes about the unemployed and those on benefits.

 

Full paper, 
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/f4ytRGpfyBVCHFzXk4R8/full

Colescing the Mirror and Screen

Coalescing the Mirror and the Screen

Consuming the ‘Self’ Online

 Continuum
DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2016.1239066
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1239066

Abstract;

While humanity has always found means to represent itself through material artefacts, the digital age and its attendant screen culture offer interesting ways to ubiquitously capture and to produce the self as a digital artefact online for personal and public consumption. The non-stop capture of ourselves and our specular double are distinctive to digital living where the self can be objectified and consumed relentlessly, and where others can partake in consuming us. This paper argues that the self remains a primal subject of interest online sustaining our ‘mirror moment’ of self-discovery and recognition. Our fascination with the self is elevated further through our social and historical valorisation of the screen, which has over time stood for public spectacle and voyeurism. The screen, once the preserve of newsmakers, the celebrity or the morbid, has been disaggregated into a theatre for the consumption of the self. This ubiquitous consumption of the screen is premised through the concepts of the mirror and the screen in this paper. 

Copies at;
 http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/25CTrAc2JqAJS44TEcf5/full