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Short abstract:

This paper brings a media theoretical perspective on mediatized wars. It argues that the affordances and use cultures of popular social media platforms turn wars into live media events, involving both people who are living under war and those joining in from a distance.

Long abstract:

This paper brings a media theoretical perspective on mediatized wars. It argues that the affordances and use cultures of popular social media platforms turn wars into live media events in which liveness – a sense of “being now here together” (Hammelburg, 2021) – involves both people who are living under war and those joining in from a distance.

This involvement is of a very different kind than what we know from earlier wars that were mediated through radio and television; the logics of platformed media have permeated and transformed everyday life (Altheide, 2018; Deuze, 2012; Hepp, 2019). Many people living under war share their personal experiences and thoughts through TikTok and Instagram, involving followers worldwide as witnesses at a distance. Further, these war followers are not only involved as witnesses, very often they also add their own social media content to the “event-sphere” (Volkmer and Deffner, 2010) of the war, and by doing so they write themselves into it.

Drawing from media theory on liveness and empirical material – photos and videos – from TikTok and Instagram concerning the wars in Ukraine and Russia, and Israel and Gaza, this paper shows how wars as live events are constructed. In its analyses of different modes of involvement in these live war event-spheres, it addresses the issue of positionality.