Abstract
In this article I argue that the meaning of presence in journalism is taking on new forms as the photographer, bystander or citizen journalist may be absent in body but remains present in digital form and interconnected with that technology. Using the reference point of new materialist concepts this entanglement is shown through what I will call the aesthetics of posthuman experience. It then proceeds to undertake a posthuman reading of three videos posted online between 2009 and 2012 of demonstrations in Greece, Iran and Poland arguing these make manifest two key lines of thinking in new materialist theories: the nature-culture continuum and the material-semiotic. Technology, hereby, is endowed with subjectivity in continuous relation with the viewer. Employed by citizens, such drone or digital aesthetics of posthuman experience use a more nuanced mediascape beyond ‘objectivity’ and ‘journalistic truth’ for their frame of reference and for defining knowledge and reality.
Highlights
The trauma is the suspension of language, a blocking of meaning
Presence has been crucial to photography and filming, and due largely to technological advancements in recent decades, the understanding of temporal and spatial presence as well as the understanding of whom and what is a photographer or a journalist has been discussed extensively (Allan, 2013; Andén-Papadopoulos, 2013; Wahl-Jørgensen, 2012; Zelizer, 2010). It is in particular the disequilibrium and disorientation of viewing online mobile phone footage and other citizen media, the changed aesthetics of online visuals, that has put the issue of the presence of technology in concert with the photographer, the witness, into focus
The continuous development or growing capacity of technogenesis (Hayles, 2013) makes available an analysis of the meaning of presence in visual journalism and the power relations implicit in this technologically entangled ‘being there’ shown through what I will call an aesthetics of posthuman experience
Summary
The trauma is the suspension of language, a blocking of meaning. Certainly situations which are normally traumatic can be seized in a process of photographic signification but precisely they are indicated via a rhetorical code which distances, sublimates and pacifies them. In this article the question of presence and authenticity of which Barthes so eloquently spoke and the material-semiotic theory of technogenesis and the new materialist understanding of the non-unitary subjectivity come together in an argument for thinking differently about visual, online citizen media witnessing as posthuman.
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