GoPro occupation: Networked cameras, Israeli Military rule, and the digital promise

This paper is an ethnographical exploration of the growing importance of photographic technologies within the contemporary political theater of Israel’s military occupation studied from the vantage of Israeli actors and institutions. My ethnography focuses on the Israeli military’s growing investment in cameras as public relations technologies and how Israeli human rights groups are employing camera technologies against the military in unprecedented ways and degrees. Both institutions are now laboring to translate their work into visual registers, recognizing that political claims making depends on networked cameras and viral images as never before. My analysis focuses on what I term the “analytics of lapse”—instances in which photographic technologies, images, and associated infrastructures break down, lag, or otherwise fail to deliver on their ostensible communicative promise. Lapse provides a mean of thinking against cyber-utopian theories of new media even as it provides a way of unsettling enduring Israeli colonial logics of technological modernity.

Duke Scholars

Author Rebecca L. Stein Cultural Anthropology