The Internet has created innumerable possibilities for the construction of memorials devoted to tragic or catastrophic events and the exercise of collective memory. Two recent American disasters, the September 11, 2001 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, have been widely commemorated and memorialized online. This article examines the nature of online disaster commemoration through an analysis of the messages and stories submitted to two digital archives devoted to these disasters: the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. By viewing these online archives as sites of prosumption, inasmuch as the sites’ users both produce and consume its content, the article is able to tease out connections to other prosumer-oriented trends surrounding commemoration and collective memory in the physical landscape. These trends include the increasing popularity of spontaneous shrines and the growing acceptance of therapeutic monuments. These two forms of prosumption also manifest themselves online in the digital memory banks studied here, in that they allow a wide variety of different users to contribute to the commemoration of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina in ways that often seek to enact a kind of therapeutic self-help and emotional catharsis. However, an analysis of the messages and stories left at these archives also points to some of the political limitations of such therapeutic forms of prosumption.
When the public outcry concerning the 'Facebook experiment' began, many commentators drew parallels to controversial social science experiments from a prior era. The infamous Milgram (1963) and Zimbardo (1973) experiments concerning the social psychology of obedience and aggression seemed in some ways obvious analogs to the Facebook experiment, at least inasmuch as all three violated norms about the treatment of human subjects in research. But besides that, what do they really have in common? In fact, a close reading of Milgram, Zimbardo, and the Facebook experiment reveals something about the way power-both as a subject of scholarly inquiry and as an element wielded by researchersis conceptualized today. Although all three experiments were, in essence, measuring the researchers' ability to induce an emotional or behavioral change in subjects, the Facebook experiment did much more than the others to hide such considerations and naturalize the exercise of power at work in that study. This paper thus argues that the invisibility of power in the discourse of the Facebook experiment demonstrates, in miniature, the more insidious elements of big data as a whole.
The term disaster porn has evolved over time, from an epithet directed at extreme depictions of suffering in the developing world, to a broader critique today of all sorts of disaster-related media—even fictional Hollywood blockbusters. Sociologist Timothy Recuber examines how disaster porn, in all its iterations and for all its flaws, is a vital political terrain in which publics are at least implicitly asked to struggle with the social significance of the suffering of others.
The Occupy movement has drawn attention to the political potential of online communities, and raised questions about the forms of emotional commitment that such communities engender. It has also generated a backlash, as supporters of the political-economic status quo have gone online to question or condemn the movement. This paper performs a discourse analysis of the messages left at one anti-Occupy site called We Are The 53%, in order to see whether such messages engaged with the idea that the current economic system creates unfair hardship and suffering. Surprisingly, the majority of the messages at We Are The 53% did not deny the existence of such hardship, but instead evinced a kind of superficial empathy with the suffering of others that viewed others’ misfortune as ultimately manageable. The paper thus questions the progressive political value of empathy in online spaces.
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