“Je suis Charlie” and the Digital Mediascape: The Politics of Death in the Charlie Hebdo Mourning Rituals

This article examines rituals of mourning in the digital mediascape in the case of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, 2015. The idea of the digital mediascape draws on Arjun Appadurai’s (1990) seminal work on mediascape and develops it further in the current framework of digital media. Rituals of mourning are approached as a response and a reaction to the anxiety and distress caused by the unexpected violent death of global media attention. The phenomenology of ritual practices in Charlie Hebdo is characterised as multi-layered, relational and coexisting. The article looks in particular at the ritual mourning in association with the message and the meme “Je suis Charlie”. The ‘imagined worlds’ created around the digital circulation of this ritual message are discussed in relation to the idea of the politics of death formed around such fundamental value-laden questions as whose life counts as life and is thus worthy of public recognition of mourning, as Judith Butler (2004) has asked

VALUES, RITUAL AND THE MANAGEMENT OF INTERCULTURAL DIVERSITY: TESTING THE GROUND IN THE MEDIA

VALUES, RITUAL AND THE MANAGEMENT OF INTERCULTURAL DIVERSITY: TESTING THE GROUND IN THE MEDI

Media and religion

Peer reviewe

The Mourning News : Reporting Violent Death in a Global Age [Book review]

Book review. Reviewed work: The mourning news : reporting violent death in a global age / Tal Morse. - New York : Peter Lange, 2018. ISBN 9781433144646 (hardcover).Non peer reviewe

“Je Suis Charlie” and the Digital Mediascape : The Politics of Death in the Charlie Hebdo Mourning Rituals

Peer reviewe

Digital media ethnographers on the move – An unexpected proposal

This article explores what digital media ethnography as a methodological approach can offer to the study of contiguous media events with an unexpected, violent and fluid nature. Emphasising the role of media events in the present organisation of social life, we as digital media anthropologists acknowledge the tendency in the current digital media environment to eventise and spectacularise social life. This development serves the power-related purposes of attention seeking and public recognition in the digital world. The article is structured as follows: first, we provide a brief outline of the field of digital media ethnography in relation to the study of media event; second, we identify what we claim are three key methodological dilemmas in applying digital media ethnography to the study of today’s digitally circulating media events (scale, mobility and agency) and reflect on them in the context of our methodological positioning; third, we conclude this article by considering some epistemological and ontological implications of this methodological endeavour in relation to what can be called the ‘meta-field’ and the related instability in current digital research.Peer reviewe

‘Our words are stronger’ : Re-enforcing boundaries through ritual work in a terrorist news event

This article investigates the ritual work in terrorist news events, using the Berlin truck attack as a case in point. The article connects with the larger cluster of anthropologically inspired communication research on media events as public rituals in news media and applies digital media ethnography as its method. Fieldwork is conducted in 15 online news sites. The article identifies three key phases through which the ritual work was carried out: the rupture in the news event (ritualised as the strike), the liminal phase (ritualised as the manhunt) and the reconstitution of order following the attack (ritualised as the mourning). The article concludes with an interpretation of the broader social implications of the ritual work and related naturalisation of ‘friends’ and ‘foes’ and suggests that this type of ritual work contributes to a collective mythologisation of terrorism in news media and society at large.Peer reviewe

“You Will Never Hear Me Mention His Name” : The (Im)possibility of the Politics of Recognition in Disruptive Hybrid Media Events

This article explores how the present-day disruptive hybrid media events shape the conditions for the politics of recognition in political communication. The article sets off with the premise that disruptive hybrid media events provide a substantial context for the activation of the politics of recognition as a communicative response to violations of the value of human life enforced by terrorist mass violence. The article uses the media coverage and the communication of New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern in the aftermath of the Christchurch terrorist attacks as an empirical case study and examines, in particular, how Ardern’s political communication is intertwined with the attention economy and the related communicative capitalism, and how these essentials of hybrid media events weakened her possibilities for the realization of the politics of recognition as a communicative response to the violence, and threatened to reduce her political communication to a battle over attention, reputation, and identity politics with the perpetrator.Peer reviewe