Page 62 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Circulation 45

for individuals to participate in communication exchanges in which their
mode of address is semi-public rather than private (Lister et al. 2003: 172).
To paraphrase Manuel Castells, to live in a network society means to be
invited into a new, informational mode emphasizing knowledge generation,
information processing, and symbol communication (Castells 2000). The
network society is made out of numerous new technologies that diverse
people use in diverse real-world locations (Miller and Slater 2000: 1). It
is within these networks that people form, transmit, and modify their self-
understanding (or mis-understanding!) about the world they live in and in
which their lives are formed, transmitted, and modified by others (see also
Morgan 2005: 149). This is to say that circulation is a form of the cultural
work of the network society (Castells 2000).
How these encounters—crucial in understanding the dynamics of
circulation in network society—are constructed in the media is the topic
of this essay. The central element of the encounter is its ability to construct
relationships between different actors (Latour 2005). My analysis focuses
here, namely, on the circulation of images and relationships established
around them. As David Freedberg reminds us,

We must consider not only beholders’ symptoms and behaviour, but also
effectiveness, efficacy and vitality of images themselves; not only what
beholders do, but also what images appear to do; not only what people do
as a result of their relationship with imaged form, but also what they expect
imaged form to achieve, and why they have such expectations at all.
(Freedberg 1989: xxii)

In this essay, I present a typology of three types of relationships between
(1) the image and technology, (2) the image and the artefact, and (3) the
image and the spectator. By emphasizing “the visual aspect” in circulation, I
take seriously the challenge proposed by scholars of visual culture who argue
that the study of contemporary way of life should take a broader look at how
images or visuals (or both) are part of our ways of relating to this world and
establishing relationships in it (see e.g., Mirzoeff 1999; Jay 1988; Mitchell
2005a; Sumiala-Seppänen and Stocchetti 2007).
In this essay, I am especially interested in images of large circulation. Even
in the culture characterized by constant flow of media images, as ours, there
are types of images that have a potential of striking more public attention
and get wider public circulation than others. Images of the Abu Ghraib (AG)
torture scandal belong to this category.
Immediately after becoming public in 2004, the images started to circulate
among different mediated spaces. In the era of digital revolution, these
images were easy to reproduce, distribute, and disseminate through different