Bearing Witness through Technology

Abstract

The convergence of technologies brings a two-fold phenomenon into our technologically mediated world. Firstly, mobile technologies have enabled the recording of war and conflict by bystanders who can then transmit their recordings to the wider world through the Internet. Secondly, this form of bearing witness creates a proliferation of images of suffering leading to a new visual economy that invites new types of spectatorship which reconfigure events and integrate them into mainstream and niche media platforms. This chapter argues that the aestheticization of suffering is a dominant and integral part of our culture and new media technologies illuminate and offer new ways to both engage with and commodify suffering. The commodification of suffering on video-streaming platforms on the Internet results in spaces of perverse obsession with pain and suffering but also performative counter-sites which offer different ways to record and narrate human suffering beyond the vantage point of mainstream media.