Terror: live

TL;DR: Live-streaming terror attacks intensifies the affective capacity of images to garner support and paralyze audiences.

Abstract: ABSTRACT To what extent can the immediacy of live-streaming bring distant spectators into proximity with an event? In an article analysing the aesthetico-political stakes of terrorist-produced media, Lilie Chouliaraki and Andreas Kissas, drawing from Adriana Cavarero, differentiate between terrorism and horrorism in digitally mediated contexts: terror(ism) ‘is associated with proximity and addresses the eyewitness of violent death, horror is associated with mediated witnessing and addresses the distant spectator’. How then, should we make sense of terror attacks when they are live-streamed by the perpetrator? The Christchurch Mosque attacks marked the first time a terror attack was live-streamed on a mainstream social networking site, though as has been noted, it was not the first socially mediated iteration of performance crime. By live-streaming overt forms of violence, terrorists seek to destabilize the terror/horror dichotomy by bringing distant spectators into proximity with death. In this article, I argue that the capabilities of live-streaming technologies help to constitute a new kind of terror spectacle in which the affective capacity of images is intensified images in order to garner support and paralyze audiences who simultaneously participate in and consume the event.