ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the notion of ‘mediated witnessing’. Wearable and mobile technologies are intimately implicated with the notion of ‘bearing witness’. The person with the mobile phone recording is often thrust into the notion of the ‘witness’ in our technologically mediated world. Mobile technologies have enabled us to record and share images with the rest of society, particularly in war and conflict zones and in difficult-to-access locations. Transmitting trauma through technology has created a proliferation of images on suffering which has created both a spectatorship and scholarship on suffering, integrating personally recorded images into mainstream platforms. The aestheticisation of suffering remains integral to human need to connect with suffering and to aestheticise suffering, retaining it as distance while consuming it through a sensorium without a meaningful engagement with the subject(s) of suffering. New media technologies ‘remake’ suffering, both in commodifying it and in offering interactive platforms to engage with it.
