Abstract
Shortly following the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake, humanitarian communications specialists hailed a ‘new culture’ in disaster relief, one enabled by advances in new communications technology. The latter, they argued, were poised drastically to transform practices of rescue and aid. In this article, I argue that this ‘new culture’ should be seen as a mass phenomenon as it extended well beyond the professional humanitarian community to include average internet-users of the Global North. US users not only accessed a wealth of digitized (most often visual) material from the quake zone, but they were also encouraged to participate in the relief effort by downloading fund-raising kits, making digital donations, or merely following and ‘liking’ their favourite aid organizations. I argue that post-quake digital advocacy and action functioned as affective or immaterial labour, the unpaid work of communicating messages, ideologies, and knowledges, and of producing bio-power. As such, I suggest that, following th...
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