Social Media, Digital Exposure and Military Violence
We are
living in times when privacy and secrecy are, paradoxically, both increasingly
guarded and increasingly unstable. Our daily routines include entering multiple
password and constant adjustment of privacy settings; and yet the dominating
practice of social networking today is that of perpetual sharing. Our virtual
and material environments are filled with technologies of protection; our
governments adopt new defenses in light of Wikileaks or the Snowden affair,
knowing that more digital disclosures are likely to come. And yet, the everyday
fabric of social media culture is that of constant exposures: embarrassing
personal information, incriminating or incident photographs, or stories of
abuse and cruelty, shared willingly and joyfully on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook
of Twitter. But while big concerns over individual privacy and national secrecy
are steadily taking over the agenda of researchers, journalists, intelligence
leaders and software developers, what is often left in the shadows are
questions of mundane digital sociality, its ordinary routines and grammars, and
the ways this ordinariness shifts our horizons of violence, responsibility, and
accountability. For example, when social media becomes an archive of willing
self-recorded perpetration (such as soldiers documenting their own abuse of
civilian populations), how do we address such archives’ exposure?
Some
examples of these issues are discussed in my new co-authored book, Digital Militarism: Israeli
Occupation in the Social Media Age (with Rebecca L. Stein, Stanford
University Press, 2015): countless cases of Israeli soldiers, sharing snapshots
or everyday military brutality in the West Bank and Gaza in their Instagram and
Facebook streams. When first publicly exposed, such images had been
scandalised, as was the case of a female Israeli soldier, whose smiling
photographs in front of blindfolded Palestinian detainees caused a national
media storm in Israel in 2010. It was one of the first time social media became
a site where the ordinary violence of the Israeli military occupation turned
viral. And while some of the public outrage and the official military response
regarded the photographs incompatible with the army morale and the national
character, many Israelis commented on how common such images were to those who
had served in the Israeli army. Their anger and rage were not directed at the
depicted abuse, however – rather, they protested the photographs’ viral
exposure. “I have pictures that are far worse…Her mistake was that she put then
on the Internet”, wrote someone in an
on-line discussion, his word echoed numerous times on various forums,
talkbacks and other on-line debates. Indeed, the public debate at the time had
largely ignored the content of the photographs – no national soul searching
came as the result of that particular scandal (nor, for that matter, of any
others that followed). Rather, it became a debate about privacy and secrecy in
the age of social media. For indeed, the photographs had been taken by a
journalist blogger from the woman’s personal Facebook album. Was it wrong of
her to have publically shared such photographs? – some asked. Was it unethical,
others wondered, to have screengrabbed and circulated the content of someone’s
Facebook, unprotected by privacy settings?
To whom
are we accountable, then, when we praise – or condemn –digital exposures of
such violence? Whose privacy are we talking about? That of the offending
soldier, who titled her album “The Army – the best days of my life”? Or that of
the blindfolded Palestinian men? For indeed, they have been abused not twice –
once on the ground, and once in the social media circulation – but multiple
times, in the regime of militarised colonial rule where humiliation and torture
are both routinised and banalised, and now extend into the domain of social
media virality. And whose secrecy is at stake here? That of an individual
social media user, or that of the Israeli society as a whole? As we argue in
the book, social media has now become a site where the “public secrecy”
(Taussig, 1999) of the Israeli occupation is both threatened and reaffirmed,
when the ordinary brutality of the military rule is simultaneously exposed and
excused.
Today,
few years after that first scandal, instances of self-recorded and willingly
shared perpetrator violence in Israel no longer surprise – by the time we
finished our book in 2014, wartime Instagram snapshots and soldier selfies on
and off battlefield had filled Israeli social networks, becoming an integral
part of the new digital everyday. As such, they render the notion of a digital
“exposure” obsolete. How, then, should we refigure our debate on digital
exposures, to move from the individualised notion of privacy into the
complexity of both ethics and accountability, respect and justice? But also,
how do we account for the increasing normalisation of digital exposures, and
their incorporation into the very normative fabric of our digital political life?
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