‘Writing’ oneself into tragedy: visual user practices and spectatorship of the Alan Kurdi images on Instagram

Abstract

Studies into affective publics often involve textual communication. However, emotive communication is increasingly visual. This study zooms in on the representation of the suffering other in seven re-workings of the Alan Kurdi photographs that resonated significantly on Instagram. Chouliaraki’s concept of post-humanitarian solidarity in The Ironic Spectator (2013) is used as a theoretical framework to analyse the content of re-worked images and their post captions. Her concept outlines how distant sufferers tend to be rendered invisible due to the self-reflexive nature of contemporary solidarity. This self-reflexivity gets in the way of solidarity for others unlike us. The study found that, although the sufferer is visually present in almost all re-worked images, the suffering is ‘replaced’ by emotions or political views of the creators. Both Chouliaraki’s ‘distant other’ as well as Markham’s similar other are ways to visually (re)construct the tragedy of Alan Kurdi and the refugee crisis in general. This study adds to this an understanding of how Instagram users, while visually constructing a similar or distant other, also write themselves – often their personal feelings – into such images. Their public, other Instagram users, engages in self-reflexivity by liking such re-workings, aligning with the communicated emotions or political views conveyed. In this way, the platform ‘like feature’ intensifies the self-reflexive nature of contemporary solidarity.

From archive cultures to ephemeral content, and back: Studying Instagram Stories with digital methods

“…The Instagram APIs do not allow users to retrieve Instagram Stories. Thus, for example, the usually very useful Instagram Scraper (developed by the Digital Methods Initiative to collect Instagram posts by following hashtags and usernames, see Geboers, 2019) is not equally useful for exploring Stories. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the consequent curtailing of social media APIs (Bruns, 2019), Instagram Stories are among the social media data that cannot be (or can no longer be) obtained (Bruns, 2018).…”

#Stand with women in Afghanistan: Civic participation, symbolism, and morality in political activism on Twitter

“…Such emotional outpourings can be thought of as having a kind of performative character (Mortensen and Trenz, 2016) that plays an important role in developing an affective public (Niederer, 2016). However, for some, this mobilization and sense of community, based not around clearly laid out issues, has little chance of leading to anything that is in any way coherent and purposeful (Andrejevic, 2013; Geboers, 2019).…”

Affordances-Based Brand Relations: An Inquire on Memetic Brands on Instagram

“…More simply, users tend to instantaneously “react” to contingent content popping up on their screens (Nieborg & Poell, 2018). According to Geboers (2019)—who studied social interactions around the iconic photo of Alan Kurdi on Instagram—when exposed to social media content, users develop, basically, only two strategies of (re)action: aligning to or diverting from opinions and/or emotions vehiculated by a given post (e.g., to like or not to like posts, posting a comment of agreement or disagreement, etc.). Such “reactive attitude” is a form of collective participation that is observable in the context of online consumer culture as well.…”

“…Anyway, it remains unclear the cultural value of such ephemeral social formations aggregating around momentary expressions of sentiment. In fact, affective publics look like heterogeneous assemblages of private emotions, which seem incapable to coalesce into any kind of coherent and collective cultural meaning, such as common discourses, ideologies, or identities (Geboers, 2019). This point is made explicit in brand publics’ theory (Arvidsson & Caliandro, 2016).…”