'The unbearable lightness of militarism': the militarization of society and the aesthetics of militarism in Kuntsman, Adi and Stein, Rebecca L., Digital militarism: Israel's occupation in the social media age. 2015. Stanford University Press: Stanford, California

摘要

Social media has become pervasive. It occupies a large portion of our daily life. It provides a space to simultaneously connect to people, receive our newsfeed, voice our opinions, organize collective actions, meet new people, lobby institutions, and do many more things. Beside these mundane activities, it can also be a means to organize and perpetrate violence and conflict. The Islamic state of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) recruitment strategies emblematically demonstrate that. Moreover, soldiers go to the battlefield armed with rifles and smartphones. Citizens share, 'like', and comment on still and moving images of war in real time. Governments and military institutions communicate manoeuvres to citizens via social media. Digital militarism: Israel's occupation in the social media age (Kuntsman and Stein 2015) encourages reflections about the ambivalence of social media, which can be at once an intimate space and part of the war machine. It documents the encounter between social media and war in the context of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, so as to shed light on the interaction 'between ordinary networking practices and wartime violence' in Israeli society (2). This ephemeral and mundane but powerful and pervasive role of social media in the process of militarization characterizes what can be called the unbearable lightness of militarism (12).