Mette Mortensen

When citizen photojournalism sets the news agenda: Neda Agha Soltan as a Web 2.0 icon of post-election unrest in Iran

The article discusses the current rise of citizen photojournalism, which has received little scholarly scrutiny. Drawing on a case study of the mobile telephone footage of the Iranian woman Neda Agha Soltan, who was killed during a demonstration in Iran in June 2009, the article investigates the ethical dilemmas of the Western news media’s eager use of citizen photojournalism as a unique and headline-grabbing source. While these images may grant us insight into areas of tension, to which the media has no other access, amateur footage challenges the ethical standards of conventional journalism with its fragmentary and subjective format, not to mention the difficulties involved in tracking a clip’s author and origin. Even though the news media indisputably play an essential role as a platform for editorial selection and communication of citizen photojournalism, this article points to a general lack of editorial procedures for accommodating these new sources.

AMATEUR SOURCES BREAKING THE NEWS, METASOURCES AUTHORIZING THE NEWS OF GADDAFI’S DEATH

This article takes its point of departure in the thesis that today’s global, digitalized and convergent media environment has promoted new patterns of information gathering and dissemination within journalism, and war journalism in particular, which involve changing forms and various degrees of interplay between elite and non-elite sources as well as media professionals and amateur sources. On account of their proximity to unfolding events, amateur sources often break the news by means of raw and fragmented bits of visual and verbal information. Elite sources rarely possess the same exclusive access to information from war zones, but are instead brought in to comment on, validate and grant legitimacy to amateur sources as a form of explicit source criticism that we would like to term metasourcing. This new pattern of information gathering and sourcing within war reporting manifests itself most clearly in cases of major international news events, which render visible the multitude of sources and the speed of information production and distribution. A recent example is the capture and subsequent death of Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of the sources included by selected newspapers to report on this event, the current article investigates the following research questions: Which types of sources are brought into play in the news coverage of Gaddafi’s death, and which forms of interplay between sources in today’s globalized and convergent media landscape are indicated by this case?

What is the self in the celebrity selfie? Celebrification, phatic communication and performativity

The aim of this article is to outline celebrity selfies as a photographic genre and means of self-expression within celebrity culture. In the theoretical framework, we approach celebrity selfies on three distinct levels. First, the article elaborates on the concept of celebrification in order to set the cultural context for celebrity selfies. The second section discusses the phatic communicative function performed by celebrity selfies on social network sites to establish presence and keep fans updated and connected through the successive documentation of the everyday lives of celebrities. In the third section, we present the performativity of the image itself, which creates a sense of immediacy by putting on display its own coming into being. The following sections engage in a case study of selfies posted on the Instagram profile of the Danish pop singer and songwriter Medina, which merges intimacy, access and authenticity with promotion and branding. Finally, the conclusion elaborates on this article’s contribution to the understanding of celebrity selfies and discusses the paradox that celebrity selfies narrow the gap between celebrities and their followers, at the same time as they continuously maintain differences across the gap.

Conflictual Media Events, Eyewitness Images, and the Boston Marathon Bombing (2013)

The proliferation of camera phones over the past decade has created an unprecedented landslide of visual information in the online public sphere, transforming the form and amount of communication in relation to crisis events. International research on this subject has primarily centered on the way in which the production and dissemination of eyewitness images convert mainstream medias coverage of crisis. This article broadens the perspective by focusing on eyewitness images in relation to “conflictual media events.” The article contributes to discussions on the definition of conflictual media events in todays mediatized and connective media environment, which has undergone radical changes from the era of mass media hegemony when Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz first outlined media events. The article further examines the ways in which the circulation of eyewitness images erodes established boundaries between experts and laymen and between professionals and non-professionals in relation to conflictual media events. The bombing of the Boston Marathon in April 2013 constitutes the empirical point of departure.

Media Morality and Visual Icons in the Age of Social Media: Alan Kurdi and the Emergence of an Impromptu Public of Moral Spectatorship

New and social media are increasingly used to raise issues of global justice. Images and texts representing distant suffering in an emotionally charged way involve users of social media in debates about ethical standards and moral responsibility. This raises the question of how social media users react to such evidence about instances of distant suffering. How and under which conditions are users’ involvement in discourses of global justice enhancing new practices of civic engagement and redefining the boundaries of solidarity? Our point of departure is the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe in fall 2015, which raised questions of distant spectatorship and moral responses with renewed urgency and immediacy. We consider the conditions of collective reception and interpretation of visual icons of human suffering, which became viral through social media in this period. We first situate social media reception in the framework for the analysis of moral spectatorship. We secondly explore the link between iconic images and the emergence of so-called impromptu publics of moral spectatorship. As an empirical case, we refer to the performance of reddit discussion groups in confronting the salient images of Alan Kurdi, the drowned boy from Syria found at the beach in Turkey in September 2015.

Journalism and Eyewitness Images : Digital Media, Participation, and Conflict

Introduction: Eyewitness Images and Mediatized Conflict 1. The Eyewitness in the Media 2. Eyewitness Images as a Genre, Genres of Eyewitness Images 3. Mediatized Conflict 4. Counter-Images: Visual Censorship and the Challenges of Digital Media - the Snapshot of US Soldiers (2004) and the Bootleg Tape of Saddam Husseins Hanging (2006) 5. The Unintentional News Icon: The Canonization and Political Mobilization of the Footage of Neda Agha Soltan in the Post-Election Revolt Iran (2009) 6. Metacoverage and Mediatized Conflict: WikiLeaks Release of Collateral Murder (2010) and the Transformation of the Information Flow 7. Citizen Investigation and Eyewitness Images: The Boston Marathon Bombing (2013) Conclusion

Constructing, confirming, and contesting icons: the Alan Kurdi imagery appropriated by #humanitywashedashore, Ai Weiwei, and Charlie Hebdo:

This article argues that appropriations are central to the production and reception of visual icons: appropriations are instrumental in iconization processes as they confirm and consolidate the iconic status by recycling the image in question. Moreover, appropriations are vital to their reception as they help shape and delimit the publics and discourses surrounding visual icons. This article draws on existing research on icons and appropriations to develop a theoretical framework for how appropriations construct, confirm, and contest icons and how personification constitutes the main link between icons and their appropriations. Three sets of appropriations are analyzed of the iconic imagery of Alan Kurdi, the refugee boy drowning in the Mediterranean Sea in 2015. First, the numerous appropriations circulated under the Twitter hashtag #humanitywashedashore. Based on genre analysis of these appropriations, two overall modes are singled out: the appropriations decontextualize or recontextualize the figure of Kurdi. The two next analytical cases test the limits of decontextualization and recontextualization: Chinese artist Ai Weiwei decontextualizes the Kurdi imagery in a controversial reenactment, while a series of cartoons by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo inserted the photo into contested contexts to critique why and how this imagery was turned into an icon.

The Dynamics of Mediatized Conflicts

This chapter critically analyzes the philosophy, doctrine and practice of Influence Activity in defence. Influence Activity refers to a particular form of strategic communication conducted by the military in order to influence attitudes and behaviours through information-based activities. In doctrinal terms, Influence is defined as ‘..the power or ability to affect someone’s beliefs or action or a person or thing with such ability or power’ (MoD, 2009: 88). This ‘power’ is simultaneously conceived of as generating both ‘affect’ – in which the state of a particular scenario or dynamic is altered- and ‘effect’ in which a particular outcome is accomplished (see Morriss, 2002). Here, I examine the philosophy and practice of Influence and its associated ‘effects’ through an examination of the three embedded logics that frame and govern it: military logic (a Clausewitzian orientation to war); marketing logic (an orientation marketing principles); and media logic. These logics are particularly revealing of an encompassing military orientation to war that is both responding and contributing to the conditions in which war is performed, but also directly impacting upon how it is performed; in other words, war that is mediatized. This is explored here not only in relation to why ‘influence’ has assumed such centrality in the military’s understanding of war and defence, but also how influence is conceived and measured. In this latter regard, I argue that media (forms, ‘audiences’ and ‘effects’) are positioned in relatively idealistic terms as tangible, measurable and controllable, which, when combined with the application of ‘logics’, has a direct bearing on what, when and how media is utilized and understood. More specifically, I argue that this combination of logics and idealism is suggestive of an ‘imagining’ of (media) influence that directly relates to, and is framed by a fetishization of media (communication and effects). It is when this ‘imagining’ ‘feeds back’ into the performance of war and defence practice that we can most vividly locate the processes by which it becomes mediatized. In short, by problematizing the logics and conceptualization of influence, this chapter explores why and how the transformative power of media has become integral to war and the extent to which this is also transformative of the organization and implementation of defence politics and war itself. I start by locating the doctrine of Influence Activities within the overall framework of the strategic communications.

“The image speaks for itself” – or does it? Instant news icons, impromptu publics, and the 2015 European “refugee crisis”:

Easy internet access and ubiquitous smart phones have augmented the number of images produced and accelerated the speed by which they are circulated (and likely also forgotten). By contrast to the great quantity of pictures disseminated in today’s connective media, a few photographs gain momentum and are declared to be “icons”. They stand out from the image abundance, grasp the attention of a broad, transnational public, and stir emotional reactions and heated debates. Usually, these iconic images are related to major news events and represent an ongoing conflict or crisis in society in a simple, univocal manner. They quickly turn into standard frames of reference in news and popular culture, seem to require no particular explanation, and are often proclaimed to “speak for themselves”. This article proposes the term “instant news icon” to define and gain a fuller understanding of the role performed by iconic images in today’s connective media, distinguished by convergence between platforms and blurred boundaries between media production and media consumption. First, the article builds a framework based on the concept instant news icon and then applies quantitative and qualitative analyses to study the processes of distribution and meaning-making involved in the emergence of one instant news icon, news photographs from 2015 of a young refugee girl playing with a police officer on a Danish motorway.

Users across media: An introduction

It is an empirical fact that audiences, or users, as we prefer, are inherently cross-media (Schrøder, 2011). Media users combine, juggle and move almost seamlessly between various media platforms and services to pursue information and entertainment, carry out professional responsibilities, communicate about and act on demands in their everyday lives, and not least to interact with each other. Mobile media, such as smartphones and tablets with ubiquitous Internet access, epitomize this development by converging various media on a single multipurpose platform. A key observation in the current, digital media landscape is that media use, from television to telephones, is increasingly personalized, fragmented and connective (Holt et al., 2016). Traditional conceptions of media users – understood as the individuals or collectives (audiences, publics, spectators, etc.) at the receiving end of mediated communications – are put under pressure by the convergence of mass and interpersonal media on digital platforms and services. Users are increasingly seen as productive and participatory; they curate, share, comment and create digital media content for diverse purposes and in diverse contexts. Studying cross-media from the point of view of users and the roles they undertake when engaging with media, we contend, involves a decentring of media and a centring of the analysis on communicative practices as crystallized in patterns of cross-media use. Various notions of cross-media have emerged in audience and user studies to the enrichment of our theoretical, as well as empirical, understanding of the contemporary media user. As some of these efforts are beginning to consolidate, taking stock of the user’s perspective on the study of cross-media practices appears to be timely. Together, the seven articles compiled in this special issue do exactly this. Thus, we hope this Convergence special issue on ‘Users across media’ will form an important baseline for the future development of conceptual lenses and empirical approaches to studying users across, rather than within, media.