It has earned more than twelve million likes and hundreds of thousands of comments, including “be safe guys.” On February 24th, a user named posted two perky, influencer-style selfie videos in a luxurious home interior, lip-synching to “Who’s That Chick?,” a song by David Guetta featuring Rihanna. A TikTok from February 12th shows an outfitted Ukrainian soldier moonwalking to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” in an empty field. It is surreal to see well-established social-media formulas applied to ground warfare.
Perhaps owing to Western sympathies with the plight of Ukrainians, their videos have overwhelmed American feeds in a way few foreign news stories ever do.
A single tweet earned the clip more than ten million views, but it could also be found on YouTube, TikTok, and the sites of various news publications. One video that has circulated in recent days appears to show a Ukrainian man gingerly moving a mine, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, off of a road and into the woods. The war has become content, flowing across every platform at once. Large numbers of Ukrainian civilians are taking up arms to defend their country against Vladimir Putin’s reckless imperialism they’re also deploying their mobile cameras to document the invasion in granular detail. But in the intervening years, social platforms have become more geared toward multimedia, and smartphones have become better at capturing and streaming events in real time. The Arab Spring uprisings and the Syrian civil war used Facebook and Twitter to organize protests and broadcast D.I.Y.
The invasion of Ukraine isn’t the first conflict to play out over social media. The Internet-focussed podcast “The Content Mines” called the Ukraine invasion “The Most Online War of All Time Until the Next One.” Other publications have dubbed it the “first TikTok war.” What stands out about coverage of the war in Ukraine so far is how thoroughly the latter category of content has permeated the collective consciousness, providing some of the earliest and most direct glimpses of the Russian invasion. The video, which as of my last count had more than nine million likes, is user-generated content broadcast online, following the aesthetic norms of TikTok: choppy, decontextualized, with catchy pop music in the background. Hicks’s picture, of course, is an example of traditional photojournalism-a war photographer capturing action at the front lines of battle in a carefully composed image printed in a newspaper. A line of text reads, “The capital of Ukraine at the moment.” The video is set, with breathtaking incongruity, to “Little Dark Age,” a song by the indie-pop band MGMT, whose lyrics have become something of an audio meme on TikTok: “Just know that if you hide, it doesn’t go away.” Another equally arresting document of the war’s beginnings is a TikTok video, posted on February 24th, showing phone-camera images and video clips of missiles falling over the city of Kyiv like fireworks. Its caption noted that both the soldier and the armored vehicle were Russian and that the photo was taken in Kharkiv, the city in northeastern Ukraine where some of the most intense fighting has been taking place. The photograph ran on the front page of the Times on February 26th.
One of the most striking images from the first days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a picture, taken by the photojournalist Tyler Hicks, depicting a dead soldier sprawled on the ground in front of a disabled tank, his body covered in a sheet of fresh snow.
0 kommentar(er)
