After the attacks by Hamas on Israel on October 7th and the offensive on Palestine that followed, a group of young Palestinians have taken the role of sharing witness of the ongoing genocide through social media. This thesis investigates how these citizen journalists are bearing witness to the ongoing genocide and how social media audiences are reacting to these images. By analyzing the discourses present in their posts through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) and systematically observing the comments under said posts through a thematic analysis, this thesis demonstrates that there is a relation between shared discourses and audience reactions. The study argues that vulnerability is being used as an act of resistance, and that discourses involving vulnerability and eye-witnessing are common in these posts and inspire emotional reactions and sentiments of resistance in the audiences, and further demonstrates how the analyzed citizen journalists seem to share similar discourses and feelings while using several modes of address in variating ways from post to post. All these findings show that the current Palestinian conflict may be contributing to changes in the ways war and conflicts are mediatized due to their use of social media to create a more connective citizen journalism where audiences become closer with the distant suffering.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hj-65273 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Avelar, Beatriz |
| Publisher | Jönköping University, HLK, Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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