Publication details
Communication about the European migrant crisis in the age of deep mediatization: a case of a social network in the Czech and Slovak environment
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper deals with the topic of the communication about the so-called European migrant crisis in the virtual space of social network. It locates its approach in poststructuralist geography where our world is regarded as instable, unsettled and becoming multiplicity that continually takes place in the immanence of life. However, the becoming of this plane of immanence/consistency is stabilized and segmented by transcendent forces that often draw on people’s collective unconscious. We map workings of three types of collective unconscious that shape communicative practices concerning migrants and the migrant crisis in several Czech and Slovak discussion groups of Facebook social network. These three are technological, orientalist and optical unconscious. The technological unconscious operates primarily through indiscernible activity of software and algorithms which are typical for the present age of media digitalization and datafication. This activity limits communicative practices into a continual reproduction of media content that is shared and appraised the most. The orientalist unconscious manifests primarily in the form of stereotypical essentializations of people into opposites of “us” and “them”. Simultaneously, migrants – as supposed members of African and Islamic civilizations – are expected to be firmly structured by their savagery and Islamic religion and that is why they are anticipated to lead a war invasion into Europe. In the case of the optical unconscious, firstly, we notice how visual map imagination supports discourses of the invasion. Secondly, we notice the importance of the montage technique in the modern optical unconscious. This technique can put together affectively charged frames and, thus, introduce affects of alarm and fear, aimed at migrants. Thirdly, the visibility is inseparably linked to the truthfulness and the authentication of the real so diverse visual materials can produce truth-effects about violent and bloodthirsty migrants. |