ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on practices within the new regime of visuality. It examines the legal and policy constraints on girls' online activities, premised on the presumed vulnerability and projected sexualization of young girls. The book explores the video circulated of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan in a 2009 protest in Tehran to explore the ethics of images through questions of death, film, and sexuality. It looks at the play of proliferating images, and the collapse of reality into simulacra, that is the informatization and digitalization of the world. The ecstasy of communication is the constant availability of communication: with the decline of the broadcast model, television is now on demand, streaming, at one's beck and call. The book explores Hille Koskela's typology of the ecstasy of visuality: protective voyeurism, fame-seeking exhibitionism, banal voyeurism, and empowering exhibitionism.
