FCJ-200 When Memes Go to War: Viral Propaganda in the 2014 Gaza-Israel Conflict

Chris Rodley University of Sydney [Abstract] You won’t believe what #Hamas was hiding in a mosque! Retweet if you are outraged! #IsraelUnderFire #HamasWarCrimes
(@IsraelUnderFire, 2014, August 1) In one of his best-known provocations, Jean Baudrillard (1995) declared that the Gulf War of 1991 did not take place. For Baudrillard, the idea of the war broadcast to Western audiences by media organisations such as CNN was merely a ‘masquerade of information’, and what actually took place on the ground in Iraq was not a war at all but a horrifying ‘disfiguration of the world’ (40). In other words, the semiotic rendering of the conflict by the mass media was a simulacrum with no relationship to its supposed referent. Much has changed in the 24 years since Baudrillard’s essay series was first published. The discourse network which mediates our understanding of war – that array of technologies and institutions enabling information to be…

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