Yasmin Ibrahim

Instagramming life: banal imaging and the poetics of the everyday

Imaging the everyday through mobile digital technologies is a common phenomenon in todays digital world. While we embrace and readily accept the human need to image the banal and the trivial in our everyday lives in todays contemporary society and digital culture, our incestuous and inextricable bind with the visual needs more introspection and examination. This article examines the aestheticisation of everyday life and image capture through the notion of banal imaging where the corporeal body and mobile technologies record the everyday through the visual. The saturation of images on digital media platforms and the non-stop need to commodify everyday life through images, both still and moving, constructs the moving body, embedded with mobile technologies, as a site of multiple articulation where consumption and production of images can be seamless. The technologically embedded body is equally a site of storage and retrieval, both through human memory and mnemonic devices. From the perspective of the everyday, banal imaging transforms the perfunctory into the performative, inviting new forms of gaze, aestheticisation, engagement, communication, connection and immortalisation of life through the visual.

Marketing the "radical": symbolic communication and persuasive technologies in jihadist websites.

This paper reviews the persuasion techniques employed by jihadist websites with particular reference to the patterns of rhetoric, image, and symbolism manifested in text, videos, and interactive formats. Beyond symbolic communication, the online media needs to be also understood through its persuasive tendencies as a medium which elicits social response through its design architecture. This double articulation of new media technologies, as a medium for information and as a form of persuasive technology, has provided new means to market the radical. The marketing techniques of jihadist websites through multimedia formats have consequences for the formation of identities, both collective and individual. As a marketing tool it combines established forms of rhetoric and propaganda with new ways to reach audiences through both popular culture and religious ideologies. The paper analyses the implications for further research and counterterrorism strategies.

The Politics of Watching: Visuality and the New Media Economy

What does it mean to consume and produce images non-stop in the new media economy? Images can be captured, uploaded, downloaded, and disseminated with ease in digital platforms, raising the need to understand how these acts of image capture and circulation are embedded into the familiar and everyday as well as the extraordinary where images can re-negotiate cognitive realities and re-frame notions of authenticity and truth. This new media visuality is characterised by new consumption rituals and practices which transgress the boundaries between private pleasures, personal memories, and voyeurism, on the one hand, and public communion, witnessing, and expose on the other. This paper examines the notion of visuality in digital platforms and its consequences for postmodernity in terms of subjectivity, new forms of engagement and disenfranchisement. DOI: 10.4018/jep.2012010101 2 International Journal of E-Politics, 3(1), 1-11, January-March 2012 Copyright

Deconstructing the meerkat: fabular anthropomorphism, popular culture, and the market

Abstract In this paper we attempt to create an understanding of fabular anthropomorphism of particular relevance to marketing communication. Through an examination of the religious, anthropological, rhetorical and marketing literature on personification and anthropomorphism we arrive at six principles that characterise the use of animals as symbols in instructional storytelling. We then examine the applicability of these principles by investigating the way in which meerkats have recently been used in popular culture and marketing communication. We find that our proposed definition of a marketing-orientated fabular anthropomorphism is broadly applicable and is helpful in understanding why certain anthropomorphic depictions will resonate with audiences and others will not. Summary statement of contribution This research proposes a set of principles that help us to understand the way in which fabular instantiations of anthropomorphism can be successfully used in marketing communication. It presents a case study that demonstrates the applicability of the findings.

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

Theres 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.

The art of shoe-throwing: shoes as a symbol of protest and popular imagination:

The art of shoe-throwing has captured popular imagination and is here to stay as a form of popular political protest. In a recent incident, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao became a near-victim of a notorious flying shoe during his visit to London in February 2009. Shoe-throwing has become a celebrated art form ever since an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at then US President George W. Bush, eternally sealing Bushs last presidential moments with the iconic image of the shoe. Popular acts of communication and protests enter new forms of relationships with audiences and global spectators beyond the political context and the shoe-throwing incident is no exception. It has been consummately appropriated into popular culture and entertainment in the multimedia platforms of the internet, transforming political images and political protests into voyeuristic entertainment for the masses.

Food Porn and the Invitation to Gaze: Ephemeral Consumption and the Digital Spectacle

In the digital world, notions of intimacy, communion and sharing are increasingly enacted through new media technologies and social practices which emerge around them. These technologies with the ability to upload, download and disseminate content to select audiences or to a wider public provide opportunities for the creation of new forms of rituals which authenticate and diarise everyday experiences. Consumption cultures in many ways celebrate the notion of the exhibit and the spectacle inviting gaze through everyday objects and rituals. Food as a vital part of culture, identity, belonging, and meaning making celebrates both the everyday and the invitation to renew connections through food as a universal subject of appeal. Food imagery as a form of transacted materiality online offers familiarity, comfort, co-presence but above all a common elemental literacy where food transcends cultural barriers, offering a universal pull towards a commodity which is ephemeral yet preserved through the click economy. Food is symbolic of human solidarity, sociality and sharing and equally of difference creating a spectacle and platform for conversations, conventions, connections, and vicarious consumption. Food images symbolise connection at a distance through everyday material culture and practices.

Temporality, Space and Technology: Time-Space Discourses of Call Centres

This paper considers time‐space discourses within grand theories that have shaped the trajectory of research on call centres. A critical approach to telework needs to consider temporal and spatial configurations and space creation as a negotiation between a multitude of factors including capital, culture and human agency.

Constructing the Eastern European Other: The Horsemeat Scandal and the Migrant Other

Abstract The Horsemeat scandal in the UK in 2013 ignited a furore about consumer deception and the bodily transgression of consuming something so alien to the British psyche. The imagination of the horse as a noble and mythic figure in British history and sociological imagination was invoked to construct the consumption of horsemeat as a social taboo and an immoral proposition in the British media debates. This paper traces the horsemeat scandal and its media framing in the UK. Much of the aversion to horsemeat was intertextually bound with discourses of immigration, the expansion of the EU and the threat in tandem to the UK. Food as a social and cultural artefact laden with symbolic meaning and national pride became a platform to construct the ‘Other’ – in this case the Eastern European Other. The media debates on the horsemeat scandal interwove the opening up of the EU and particularly UK to the influx of Eastern European migration. The horsemeat controversy in implicating the Eastern Europeans for the contamination of the supply chain became a means to not just construct the ‘Other’ but also to entwine contemporary policy debates about immigration. This temporal framing of contemporary debates enables a nation to renew and contemporise its notions of ‘otherness’ while sustaining an historic social imaginary of itself.

Tank Man, Media Memory and Yellow Duck Patrol

Tiananmen Square is a compressed and repressed space of memories and histories. It is symbolic of different forms of collective forgetting and remembering for the Chinese state and a monumental space of global spectatorship. In 2013, the commemoration of the 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 in Sina Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter), demonstrated how people negotiated state censorship to remember the event. This social media commemoration was both an act of resistance against the state’s imposition of an official memory and equally a means to thwart censorship through creative expression, particularly in the form of the image. The commemoration of Tiananmen online nevertheless highlighted the hegemony of media memory where it was entrapped through the iconic image of the Tank Man. The Tank Man as a meme on social media was both a phantom place memory of Tiananmen as well as a cultural artefact re-imagined through the ludic and visual architecture of Web 2.0.