Paul Frosh

Out Now in Paperback from Palgrave Macmillan:

Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication

Edited by Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

‘Why are witnesses to salient socio-political events so important in our age of global media reporting? Testimonies are sometimes the only chance to arrive at more information which would, otherwise, have been swept under the carpet. This excellent book elaborates on, and challenges, the complex and
difficult roles of eye witnesses and of the media in truly innovative interdisciplinary ways. Everybody who deals with media in their everyday lives will be able togain new insights.’ — Professor Ruth Wodak, Lancaster University, UK

‘This is a most valuable collection of essays. Innovative, engrossing and rewarding, it provides an excellent exploration of media witnessing and isd efinitely to be recommended.’ — European Journal of Communication

Do mass media turn us all into witnesses, and what might this mean? From the Holocaust to 9/11, modern communications systems have incessantly exposed us to reports of far flung and often horrifying events, experienced by people whom we do not know personally, and mediated by a range of changing
technologies. What is the truth status of such ‘media witnessing’, and how does it depend on journalists and media organizations? What are its social, cultural and political ramifications, and what kind of moral demands can it make of audiences to act on behalf of suffering strangers? What are its
connections to historical forms of witnessing in other fields: legal, religious and scientific? And how is it tied to technological transformations in media, transformations that bridge distances in space and time and can make ordinary people the sources of extraordinary footage?

These are the themes taken up within this unique volume, now available for the first time in paperback with a special preface written by Elihu Katz. Contributors include John Durham Peters, John Ellis, Günter Thomas, Tamar Liebes, Menahem Blondheim, Tamar Ashuri, Carrie Rentschler, Joan Leach, Roy Brand, and the editors, Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski. Together they not only make a crucial intervention in ongoing debates about media witnessing and the representation of strangers, but present original conceptualizations of the relationship between knowledge, discourse and technology in the era of mass communications.

Available from http://www.palgrave.com/products/Title.aspx?pid=280405 and booksellers.

Paul Frosh teaches in the Department of Communications and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. His publications include The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Culture Industry (2003)
and Meeting the Enemy in the Living Room: Terrorism and Communication in the Contemporary Era (edited with Tamar Liebes, 2006).

Amit Pinchevski teaches in the Department of Communications and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is the author of By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (2005).

Contemporary artificial intelligence and algorithmic processes address deep-seated existential challenges and modes of desire. In so doing, they produce computational systems of imagination, an “algorithmic as if” that enables the expression, transformation, and seeming overcoming of existential limitations via technological means. This article elaborates the character of the “algorithmic as if” by focusing on Deep Nostalgia, an online tool that turns personal photographs of the deceased into looped animations which smile, blink, and move, promising to overcome mortality by technologically “resurrecting the dead.” Performing a close-reading of Deep Nostalgia’s technological processes and the public discourse around its 2021 launch, the article highlights its combination of computational learning, forms of visual representation (photography, video, and animation), and distinctive realignments of temporal experience. Together, these frame the “algorithmic as if” as a magical and affec...

Contemporary artificial intelligence and algorithmic processes address deep-seated existential challenges and modes of desire. In so doing, they produce computational systems of imagination, an "algorithmic as if" that enables the expression, transformation, and seeming overcoming of existential limitations via technological means. This article elaborates the character of the "algorithmic as if" by focusing on Deep Nostalgia, an online tool that turns personal photographs of the deceased into looped animations which smile, blink, and move, promising to overcome mortality by technologically "resurrecting the dead." Performing a close-reading of Deep Nostalgia's technological processes and the public discourse around its 2021 launch, the article highlights its combination of computational learning, forms of visual representation (photography, video, and animation), and distinctive realignments of temporal experience. Together, these frame the "algorithmic as if" as a magical and affective space for realizing impossible longings that are also reflexive encounters with the "limit-situation" of human mortality.

Contemporary artificial intelligence and algorithmic processes address deep-seated existential challenges and modes of desire. In so doing, they produce computational systems of imagination, an "algorithmic as if" that enables the expression, transformation, and seeming overcoming of existential limitations via technological means. This article elaborates the character of the "algorithmic as if" by focusing on Deep Nostalgia, an online tool that turns personal photographs of the deceased into looped animations which smile, blink, and move, promising to overcome mortality by technologically "resurrecting the dead." Performing a close-reading of Deep Nostalgia's technological processes and the public discourse around its 2021 launch, the article highlights its combination of computational learning, forms of visual representation (photography, video, and animation), and distinctive realignments of temporal experience. Together, these frame the "algorithmic as if" as a magical and affective space for realizing impossible longings that are also reflexive encounters with the "limit-situation" of human mortality.

This is the Introduction to the special issue on Covid-19 and the cultural constructions of a global crisis. Contextualizing understandings of the pandemic in relation to the concepts of 'event' and 'crisis', especially to the idea that modernity is itself a condition of perpetual crisis, it proposes that the pandemic is a crisis-event that catalyses new possibilities for making visible endemic inequalities and injustices across highly variable cultural and social domains, from the personal to the global. Always open to containment and appropriation, this crisis of visibility and invisibility is discussed as it pertains to the body, to space and social proximity, and to media and mediation. The individual contributions to the special issue are introduced in relation to these topics.

Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as freedom. Over the past decade, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. Drawing on an epistemology of social constructionism, we ask which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Instagram. We studied 20 widely used value hashtags, sampling the top 100 posts for each (N ¼ 2,000). A combined qualitative-quantitative content analysis revealed that 19 of the 20 hashtags possess distinct visual footprints, typically reflecting an orientation toward the self and an emphasis on consumption. We conclude by discussing three implications of our findings: the role of images in the social construction of the meaning of values, the distinction between internalized and externalized value depictions, and aestheticized consumption as an organizing principle of Instagram's mainstream.

"Known for being known," iconic photographs are widely circulated and symbolically powerful images that catalyze public discussion and are etched into the fabric of collective memory for succeeding generations-or so the literature postulates. Based on a multi-method research (including focus groups and a national survey), our study aimed to identify the most prevalent domestic-Israeli and foreign (non-Israeli) iconic news photographs that are recognized by the Israeli public, and to expose key features of their place in Israeli collective memory. We found that only a handful of images were recalled by a majority of people. These are images of conflict, trauma and triumph, which inspired mostly emotional reactions, especially among the eldest, who also demonstrated higher recognition scores. This article examines what such differences in recognition and reactions between photographs and between groups of individuals mean for theories of collective memory and the presumed mnemonic power of visual media.

Nostalgia is a transnational condition. It not only describes temporal displacement from a vanished past but also spatial dislocation from a lost dwelling place: home. What happens, then, when the spatio-temporal dimensions of nostalgia are realigned by media globalization? Can the transnational consumption of media texts create memory-structures that allow viewers to feel 'at home' in a past that is not 'theirs'? What might such a reconstitution of nostalgia tell us about practices of interpretation, recollection, and identification among media audiences? Addressing these questions, this article investigates the responses of Israeli television viewers to a purportedly nostalgic US drama series, Mad Men. In the process, it reemphasizes nostalgia's spatial axis, while reframing nostalgia as a construct of viewer engagement rather than as a feature of media texts. Ultimately, it proposes that contemporary transnational nostalgia possesses a double structure: it is selective, acting as an emotional and cognitive resource consciously used by audiences to examine their present personal and socio-political realities; that very use, however, depends on a 'banal cosmopolitanism' in which the mediated pasts of distant societies are seamlessly experienced as a part of viewers' proximate lifeworlds.

Iconic photographs possess broad social and symbolic significance, are widely replicated over time and circulated across media platforms, and fuel public discussion. In an era of digital memes, they have become generative resources for memetic performances that not only can draw on these images' historic authority but can also undermine it. Based on the analysis of the 'Accidental Napalm' memes, our research leads to a fourfold taxonomy, from memes that expand or expound the meaning of the original picture to those that narrow and potentially destroy its significance. Assessing Hariman and Lucaites' contention that appropriations of iconic images enhance civic engagement and public culture, we argue that some memes may actually dissolve the original significance of iconic photographs and potentially degrade, rather than enhance, public culture.

Media Events is a key text in explicating the relation between media and event insofar as it provides an account of time experienced through the structures and practices of broadcasting. We suggest that Dayan and Katz's book investigates the heyday of a particular version of historicity, which is now giving way to a networked configuration of media events. Media witnessing introduces a bottom-up rather than top-down making of the event. The expansion of mobile digital technologies gives rise to multiple temporalities and trajectories of events through the media.

Contemporary media saturation requires us to rethink the notion of crisis. This paper characterizes crisis not in terms of isolable moments and significant events, but as a generalized and routine background condition—a persistent crisis-readiness. It is sustained and performed by a new media configuration: an assemblage of mediation, representation and experience that we call “media witnessing.” Focusing on how media witnessing foregrounds the immanent decisiveness of everyday existence, the interconnectivity and unpredictability of mediated networks, and the mutual vulnerability of dispersed publics, the paper calls for an understanding of crisis as a perpetual condition of transformative possibility.

Contemporary media saturation requires us to rethink the notion of crisis. This paper characterizes crisis not in terms of isolable moments and significant events, but as a generalized and routine background condition—a persistent crisis-readiness. It is sustained and performed by a new media configuration: an assemblage of mediation, representation and experience that we call “media witnessing.” Focusing on how media witnessing foregrounds the immanent decisiveness of everyday existence, the interconnectivity and unpredictability of mediated networks, and the mutual vulnerability of dispersed publics, the paper calls for an understanding of crisis as a perpetual condition of transformative possibility.

Out Now in Paperback from Palgrave Macmillan: Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication Edited by Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) ‘Why are witnesses to salient socio-political events so important in our age of global media reporting? Testimonies are sometimes the only chance to arrive at more information which would, otherwise, have been swept under the carpet. This excellent book elaborates on, and challenges, the complex and difficult roles of eye witnesses and of the media in truly innovative interdisciplinary ways. Everybody who deals with media in their everyday lives will be able togain new insights.’ — Professor Ruth Wodak, Lancaster University, UK ‘This is a most valuable collection of essays. Innovative, engrossing and rewarding, it provides an excellent exploration of media witnessing and isd efinitely to be recommended.’ — European Journal of Communication Do mass media turn us all into witnesses, and what might this mean? From the Holocaust to 9/11, modern communications systems have incessantly exposed us to reports of far flung and often horrifying events, experienced by people whom we do not know personally, and mediated by a range of changing technologies. What is the truth status of such ‘media witnessing’, and how does it depend on journalists and media organizations? What are its social, cultural and political ramifications, and what kind of moral demands can it make of audiences to act on behalf of suffering strangers? What are its connections to historical forms of witnessing in other fields: legal, religious and scientific? And how is it tied to technological transformations in media, transformations that bridge distances in space and time and can make ordinary people the sources of extraordinary footage? These are the themes taken up within this unique volume, now available for the first time in paperback with a special preface written by Elihu Katz. Contributors include John Durham Peters, John Ellis, Günter Thomas, Tamar Liebes, Menahem Blondheim, Tamar Ashuri, Carrie Rentschler, Joan Leach, Roy Brand, and the editors, Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski. Together they not only make a crucial intervention in ongoing debates about media witnessing and the representation of strangers, but present original conceptualizations of the relationship between knowledge, discourse and technology in the era of mass communications. Available from http://www.palgrave.com/products/Title.aspx?pid=280405 and booksellers. Paul Frosh teaches in the Department of Communications and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. His publications include The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Culture Industry (2003) and Meeting the Enemy in the Living Room: Terrorism and Communication in the Contemporary Era (edited with Tamar Liebes, 2006). Amit Pinchevski teaches in the Department of Communications and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is the author of By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (2005).