"Much writing has been produced during the Gaza genocide on the practice of looking: what it means to witness, via our tiny pocket screens, what has been called the most visible genocide in modern history. This writing has disproportionately focused on the content itself, verbally and textually reproducing viral images of human rights abuses, rendering them symbols in a new cultural lexicon of our collective witnessing. Each time I read another piece that invokes images of human suffering, I can't help but think: there is no poetry in this, any of it. I have repeatedly wondered how we can attend to and challenge genocide without reproducing it, without further commodifying it amidst its constant unfolding. I feel that there is an imperative to move beyond our culture of spectatorship, which is ultimately tied to a culture of consumption, in our response. In search of possible antidotes, I wish to offer a critical analysis of how social media infrastructure functions in genocide, how it impacts our political discourse communities, and the type of action it produces, in order to understand the effect that this has had on political activism and organizing more broadly. Perhaps by first identifying problems, we can begin to imagine solutions."

Author: Leila Abdelrazaq
Year: 2024
Pages: 14
Cover: Softcover
Language: English