Visual Propaganda and Extremism in the Online Environment

Visual images have been a central component of propaganda for as long as propaganda has been produced. But recent developments in communication and information technologies have given terrorist and extremist groups options and abilities they never would have been able to come close to even 5 or 10 years ago. There are terrorist groups who, with very little initial investment, are making videos that are coming so close to the quality of BBC or CNN broadcasts that the difference is meaningless, and with access to the web they have instantaneous access to a global audience. Given the broad social science consensus on the power of visual images relative to that of words, the strategic implications of these groups’ sophistication in the use of images in the online environment is carefully considered in a variety of contexts by the authors in this collection.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1942/thumbnail.jp

Humanist Narratology and the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy

What is a “humanistic drama”? Although we might describe narrative works as humanist, and references to the humanistic drama abound across a breadth of critical media, including film and literary theory, the parameters of these terms remain elliptical. My work attempts to clarify the narrative conditions of humanism. In particular, humanists ask how we use narrative texts to complicate our understanding of others, and question the ethics and efficacy of attempts to represent human social complexity in fiction. After historicising narrative humanism and situating it among related philosophies, I develop humanist hermeneutics as a method for reading fictive texts, and provide examples of such readings. I integrate literary Darwinism, anthropology, cognitive science and social psychology into a social narratology, which catalogues the social functions of narrative. This expansive study asks how we can unite the descriptive capabilities of social science with the more prescriptive ethical inquiry of traditional humanism, and aims to demonstrate their productive compatibility. From this groundwork, I then look at a cluster of humanistic film texts: the suburban ensemble dramedy, a phenomenon in millennial American cinema politicising the quotidian and the domestic. Popular works include The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine, Little Children, Junebug, The Oranges, and what is arguably the inciting feature in a wave of such films entering production, American Beauty. I provide examples of humanist readings of these films at two levels: an overview of genre development as social phenomenon (including histories of suburban depiction onscreen, ensemble cinema and affective experimentation in recent American filmmaking), followed by a close reading of a progenitor text, Ron Howard's 1989 film Parenthood

Aesthetics of destruction in contemporary science fiction cinema

Mass destruction imagery within the science fiction film genre is not a new cinematic development. However, a swell of destruction-centred films has emerged since the proliferation of digital technologies and computer-generated imagery that reflect concerns that extend beyond notions of spectacle. Through illusionistic realism techniques, the aesthetics of mass destruction imagery within science fiction cinema can be seen as appropriating the implied veracity of other film traditions in order to create a baseline of visual credibility, even to the extent of associating its own fantastical fictions with recent historic destruction events. This thesis investigates the representation of mass destruction across the spectrum of contemporary science fiction films emerging from around the world by examining the various methods employed to affect the spectator. The study is divided into four sections: realism, spectacle, sublimity, and correlation. It is structured so as to escalate from the establishment of a baseline of vraisemblance of the spectator’s empirical understanding of the world, to new representations of death and destruction, whereby visual aesthetic correlations emerge between science fiction and historical fact. My study attempts to contribute to the current discourse on science fiction cinema by focusing on the relationship between the aesthetics of realism and spectacle and their impact on spectatorial affect. By re-defining notions of film realism and the cinematic sublime, and through close textual analyses of a number of contemporary science fiction films, the intent of this paper is to present a greater understanding of the complicated inherencies borne by mass destruction spectacle