Reaction Images and Metawitnessing

Abstract

No matter what the event that occurs in the public life of today’s networked and mediatized societies, social media reactions to its witnessing have become crucial in assessing their significance and circulation through economies of attention and, accordingly, their affective dynamics. In many ways, images have become the currency of attention and affectivity in online communication. From emojis to photographs and from GIFs to videos, communicating with images is now more popular than ever. An average of around 500 hours of video material are uploaded on YouTube every minute. On Facebook alone, about 4000 photos are posted every second, amounting to about 350 million photos a day. As Wolfgang Ullrich and Andr e Gunthert have both noted, images have attained a speech-like quality within digital cultures, one more closely associated with orality. Crucial to this communicative function is the emergence of images that are not simply shared, but used as a response by depicting reactions of groups or individuals. These ‘reaction images’, as I will call them, convey experiences, attitudes and emotions that build connections with others through affective feedback loops. Posting the ‘Michael Jackson eating popcorn’ GIF to indicate how much you are enjoying watching a video someone just shared, or recording a reaction video while watching this video for the very first time and circulating this as an immediate response to it – these are varieties of showing and communicating reactions to something seen or witnessed online.