ABSTRACT

Digital media have been celebrated for giving voice and attributing agency to the hitherto voiceless victims of disaster or oppression (Meier; Crowley et al. 2013; UNOCHA 2013). Taking my point of departure in the key implication of this claim, namely that the vocalization of the suffering of victims facilitates cosmopolitan processes of symbolic recognition that go beyond Western communities of belonging (Silverstone), I explore how voice is distributed in two crucial instances of digital journalism: the Haiti earthquake (2010) and the Egyptian Arab Spring (2011). I conclude that the voicing of victimhood is a precarious process with ambivalent implications: it can both invite recognition of the victim’s agency as a catalyst of its own historical destiny (even if, as we shall see, such recognition is itself fragile and contingent) and re-establish the victim’s passivity as a powerless subject within the asymmetrical structures of the global order. The potential for cosmopolitan solidarity in convergent journalism, I argue, depends therefore on the positioning of the victim’s voice in a broader system of Western journalism and on the degree to which such positioning may guarantee the digital and symbolic resources for such a voice to be heard and recognized as worth listening and responding to.