“IN DECEMBER 2006, Time magazine famously awarded its Person of the Year Award to “you.” The decision was a nod to the advent of a new and prominent actor in online communications and media, one that promised to revolutionize the way in which we generated and consumed online content: the user.”
““Like”-driven online media economy.”
“But in addition to unleashing the power for distant and unknown users to share information, the media revolution that Time flagged in 2006 has also radically altered the marketplace of new media, ushering in an economy largely fueled by viral content and clickbait.”
“For its cover image announcing “you” as the winner of that year’s Person of the Year Award, Time cleverly covered the screen of the featured computer with a reflective material representing a mirror. And if that mirror was meant to reflect the vast majority of well-meaning and innocent users who generate the content that now helps fuel the new online media economy, ISIS represents the dark side of that mirror, a transnational ideology that uses that same viral economy to expand its reach.”
“This is most clearly evident in its use of terror, which in many ways represents a macabre and nihilistic use of clickbait to raise its profile and heighten its stature among the audience it seeks to reach. Of course, terrorists have long sought to publicize their causes with high-visibility attacks”
“the so-called propaganda of the deed.”
“ISIS has done more than simply master the rules of that clickbait economy. It has also mastered the techniques necessary to convert some of the viewers it attracts to its ideology. And by successfully infiltrating the minds of even an infinitesimal number of European countries’ citizens, it no longer needs to infiltrate their territories. The threat, in other words, is not carried by a person or group across a border, as in the case of the 9/11 attackers who needed to enter the US to attack it, but already within.”
“What has changed in the meantime is the advent of the viral economy in online media, whose structural logic has conditioned users to a near-compulsive and reflexive mode of online behavior that greatly facilitates ISIS’s messaging.”
“And if the medium is indeed the message — and in this case the medium is viral videos and content — then we must begin to understand ISIS’s appeal as a sort of ideological virus, one that opportunistically infects people with a wide range of emotional and psychological profiles, but who usually share certain traits that include social marginality and exclusion, and the resentment bred of failed narcissism.”
“there are enough exceptions, including converts from outside Islam and from among non-immigrant communities, to make it clear that there is no natural or inherited protection from the group’s ideology.”
“But even then, it’s not clear how such a widened understanding might help us to counter the phenomenon. Clearly, there must be a robust counterterrorism effort to interdict future attacks and dismantle ISIS’s cells and networks. Anyone who takes up ISIS’s violent ideology and murders innocent people in its name — regardless of the reason — must be dealt with.”