Conférence – The Fallen image in Ukrain

The battle over representations and perceptions of war is transformed in an era of billions of images, videos and other digital content of war being produced, shared, edited, liked, linked, fabricated and deleted on social media platforms and messaging apps. And these messages, images and video, pouring out of smartphones, surely makes the 2022- Russian war against Ukraine, the most documented and the most personalised war in history. Soldiers, civilians, journalists, victims, aid workers, presidents, journalists, are recording and uploading their experience and vision of events second by second, to platforms such as Telegram, tracking every twist and turn. The battlefield seems open to all in this emergent form of ‘participative war’. But this is no panacea for either understanding or remembrance. Instead, social media make war and memory in their own image, through the siege for attention, disinformation and splintered realities; choose your own feed, select your own memory. I ask what kind of memory might – or might not – emerge from the astonishing abundance of digital visual content of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Who will secure its past and how? 

Andrew Hoskins est professeur de sécurité mondiale à l’Université de Glasgow, au Royaume-Uni. Il étudie la relation entre les médias, la guerre et la mémoire depuis près de 30 ans.

Dans le cadre du séminaire Les Voies des images.