The mouse, the screen and the Holocaust witness: Interface aesthetics and moral response

Abstract

How do the aesthetic attributes of digital interfaces affect users’ ability to respond morally to the witnessing of suffering? Focusing on mainstream Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), this article proposes a phenomenology of user experience centred on the moral obligations of attending to, engaging with and acting upon digitized Holocaust survivor testimonies. The GUI, it argues, produces a regimen of eye–hand–screen relations that oscillates between ‘operative’ and ‘hermeneutic’ modes of embodied attention, creating a default condition of bodily restlessness that threatens prolonged, empathetic encounters with depicted others. Nevertheless, interface attributes of real-time screen interaction, haptic sensuousness and user-indexicality enable moral engagement with the witness-survivor, while translating information-sharing into the moral action of co-witnessing. These attributes enable an ‘ethics of kinaesthetics’ that converts sensorimotor responsiveness into moral responsibility. Digital interfaces have established a historically novel situation, where moral response to distant suffering depends on the smallest movements of our fingers and eyes.

Virtual reality witness: exploring the ethics of mediated presence

“…Immersive witnessing links claims about VR with media witnessing as a framework for conceptualising morality in the relationship between spectator and distant other (Frosh and Pinchevski 2011). In accounts of media witness, the ability of the media technologies to sustain an experience of presence has played an important, albeit often implicit role, linking the spectator spatially and temporally to distant suffering.…”

Digital political infographics: A rhetorical palette of an emergent genre

“…Digital infographics are complex intersections between interfaces, people and data. Dwelling on a conceptualization of interfaces as systems through which relations between a user and a device are executed, experienced, and displayed (Frosh, 2018; Pold, 2005), we argue that some infographic types invite users to manipulate onscreen objects in ways that shape distinct experiences. Thus, while generally the working of the computer is transparent to end-users (Chun, 2008, 2011), in these instances participants experience infographics as interfaces which are explicitly open to modification.…”

“…The second dimension that we analyzed, tagged by us as “tactility,” refers to the manner in which data are experienced in digital infographics. If traditional infographics are intended to be consumed through sight and cognition, in digital spheres this experience expands into a complex sensory intersection between eye, hand, and screen (Frosh, 2018), which may create a sense of “touching” data. Inspired by McMillan’s (2002) aforementioned four categories of interactivity, we suggest a conceptualization of digital infographics as relationships between data and readers through a coded interface.…”

Theorizing Media Memory: Six Elements Defining the Role of the Media in Shaping Collective Memory in the Digital Age

“…Moreover, due to the unique characteristics and affordances of digital media, such as its immediacy and the role of user‐generated content, collective recollecting in the digital age are redefining (Birkner & Donk, ; Frosh, ; Hajek, Lohmeier, & Pentzold, ; Tirosh, ). An initial exploration of online memory might suggest that the changes brought upon by digital technologies are unprecedented, in a way that alters the essence of collective recollecting.…”