ABSTRACT
Many analyses of image testimonies in social media begin and end with the same assumption: that while social media are new means for circulating witnessing texts, they rarely provide their content. What we witness via Facebook, Twitter, etc., tends not to be Facebook, Twitter, etc. In contrast, this paper asks what we can learn from instances where image testimonies are not just distributed through digital platforms, but also foreground key aspects of the medium itself. Proceeding through the close-reading of three examples, it explores how social media reconfigure existing modes of witnessing—eye-witnessing, flesh-witnessing and world-witnessing—to reveal the underlying techno-cultural potentialities and vulnerabilities of our networked lives. The power of these image testimonies derives not only from the topics they convey (injustice, suffering, death), but from their poetic ability to constitute digital networks themselves as witnessable worlds, as new domains of embodied being.
