ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how literary, visual, and digital media intra-act with one another in the twenty-first century and the implications this has for the remediation and witnessing of violence and suffering. As social media platforms and digital technologies grow in efficiency and reach, the general public is both more easily exposed to images of suffering but also, perhaps, more able to do something about what they witness. The chapter consequently considers some of the strengths and limitations of digital media as a tool in support of protest and dissidence. To do this, the chapter returns to Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire and charts a possible relationship between the ethics of reading and the ethics of mediation. Drawing from the aural and technological landscape of Home Fire, the chapter considers how it might be possible to make sense of meaning via ethical praxes—both for the reader and the subjects who are represented. The chapter then takes up the case of Neda Agha Soltan, whose death during the 2009 Green Movement was recorded and widely broadcast on social and news media, and asks: What are the ethical ramifications when we witness another’s mediatised death or suffering?
