Reframing (inner) terror: A digital discourse-based approach to evidential repositioning of reader reactions towards visual reframing

Abstract

The present article claims that the British public opinion’s repositioning towards inner terror after the 2017 Westminster attacks was (i) affected by the visual reframing of an original viral press photograph of the attacks targeting a Muslim passerby as an inner terrorist and (ii) linguistically expressed through the use of ‘look’ object-oriented visual markers of evidentiality in written digital discourse. To support this claim, British readers’ commentaries on a selection of online opinion articles reframing inner terror into terror through the use of reframed press photographs will be taken as the corpus of analysis. The ultimate aim of the article is to unveil the British readers’ reactions to the reframed photographs of the attacks as linguistically expressed through their use of ‘look’ object-oriented repositioning strategies of visual evidentiality in order to analyse the repositioning process.