Paul Frosh
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 640404 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Paul Frosh |
| NOMBRES | Paul |
| APELLIDO | Frosh |
| FIRMA | FROSH P |
| AFILIACIONES | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4813-074X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 36 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 162 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 34 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2001 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
The expression of values on social media
Social media is a central arena for the articulation of values, shaping what people around the world deem important and desirable. However, traditional value typologies struggle to capture the dynamic nature of value expression in digital spheres and overlook new communication-related values prevalent in these environments. Addressing these gaps, we developed an analytical framework for investigating value expression on social media, comprising t…
Seeing Photographically and the Memory of Photography
“Seeing photographically” is an act of cultural memory. In an era of AI-generated images, screenshots, “disappearing” or “view once” photographs, and myriad other practices that challenge the definitional boundaries of photography, the phrase invokes past understandings of the medium’s sensory affordances, transferring them into a continually changing present. Focusing on a case study of the digital “rescue” of found film chemical photography, th…
“I love this photo, I can feel their hearts!” How users across the world evaluate social media portraiture
Portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since “global” portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which evaluative criteria do they use when judging th…
How iconic news images travel
Iconic photographs are symbolically dense images characterized by broad circulation over time and recognition by large publics. Following this definition, we track the republication and reframing, over nearly 70 years, of 15 news photographs previously identified as most recognized by the Israeli public. Distinguishing between “discrete icons” (singular photographs of particular scenes) and “aggregate icons” (where several variants of the same ev…
“I Love This Photo! I Can Feel Their Hearts”. How Users Across the World Evaluate Social Media Portraiture
Personal portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since “global” portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which evaluative criteria do they use when j…
The taste of video
Recipe videos are among the most viral genres of videos on social media. Yet, little research has been done on their aesthetic and formal attributes, especially on how they operate within the frameworks of the attention economy and embodied interaction specific to social media interfaces. This paper examines recipe videos published on Tasty, one of the most popular Facebook pages in the world. We analyze these videos through a three-dimensional m…
The “algorithmic as if
Contemporary artificial intelligence and algorithmic processes address deep-seated existential challenges and modes of desire. In so doing, they produce computational systems of imagination, an “algorithmic as if ” that enables the expression, transformation, and seeming overcoming of existential limitations via technological means. This article elaborates the character of the “algorithmic as if ” by focusing on Deep Nostalgia , an online tool th…
L’image gestuelle. Selfie, théorie de la photographie et sociabilité kinesthésique
Au cours des dernières années, le selfie est devenu une pratique culturelle quotidienne et un genre photographique d’une popularité extraordinaire – accompagné, peut-être inévitablement, par des controverses et une certaine hostilité du public. Dans le même temps, le selfie est devenu un nouvel objet d’intérêt scientifique. Et pourtant, peu de travaux ont théorisé l’esthétique du selfie. Cet article cherche à combler cette lacune. Reconfigurant t…
Covid-19
This is the Introduction to the special issue on Covid-19 and the cultural constructions of a global crisis. Contextualizing understandings of the pandemic in relation to the concepts of 'event' and 'crisis', especially to the idea that modernity is itself a condition of perpetual crisis, it proposes that the pandemic is a crisis-event that catalyses new possibilities for making visible endemic inequalities and injustices across highly variable c…
From user-generated content to a user-generated aesthetic
This paper calls for renewed critical examination of the representational practices of commercial brands on social media, in particular their appropriation and adaptation of user-generated “amateur” or “vernacular” cultural styles. It proposes that this appropriation parallels processes of professionalization, influencer culture, and self-branding on social media. Focusing empirically on the official Instagram accounts of 12 leading fashion brand…
What Does #Freedom Look Like? Instagram and the Visual Imagination of Values
Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as freedom. Over the past decade, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. Drawing on an epistemology of social constructionism, we ask which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Instagram. We studied 20 widely used value has…
Sentient Photography
Thanks to the smartphone, photography has become pervasive in contemporary digital culture. Yet the smartphone’s very ‘smartness’ profoundly alters the relations of control between humans and technologies in image-production practices. Unlike dedicated cameras, smartphones use built-in sensors for small-scale positioning to ‘sense’ user’s bodily orientations and states of motion. Combined with photographic applications, this ‘sentience’ enables d…
From User Generated Content to a User Generated Aesthetic
Recent research has emphasized the increasing professionalization of ‘user-generated content’ for digital networks and social media. This paper highlights a contrary but parallel process: the aesthetic ‘vernacularization’ of brand images on social media and the adoption of recognizably ‘amateur’ styles by corporate brands. Analyzing the official Instagram accounts of 24 leading fashion brands between 2014-18, our research project identified eight…
"Taste This Video!"
Videos are among the most widely used media formats on Facebook. Yet little research has been done on their aesthetic and formal attributes, and especially on how they operate within the frameworks of attention, interruption and embodied interaction specific to social media interfaces. This paper examines recipe videos published on Tasty, one of the most popular Facebook pages in the world. We analyze these videos through a novel three-dimensiona…
Reliving Memories (Over and Over Again)
This paper examines potential changes in the temporal experience of everyday digital media through the smartphone photo album. Smartphone photo albums not only organize and display domestic photographs but also initiate temporally novel photographic formats: for instance, the images taken by users can be used as raw material in the production of new kinds of ‘moving’ or ‘animated’ photographic products, usually formatted as GIF files and characte…
What Does #Freedom Look Like? Instagram and the Visual Imagination of Values
Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as compassion or freedom. While visualizing the abstract is not new, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. In this paper, we address an unexplored question about this process: which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Ins…
Reviving icons to death
Iconic photographs possess broad social and symbolic significance, are widely replicated over time and circulated across media platforms, and fuel public discussion. In an era of digital memes, they have become generative resources for memetic performances that not only can draw on these images’ historic authority but can also undermine it. Based on the analysis of the ‘Accidental Napalm’ memes, our research leads to a fourfold taxonomy, from mem…
Media and events after Media Events
Media Events is a key text in explicating the relation between media and event insofar as it provides an account of time experienced through the structures and practices of broadcasting. We suggest that Dayan and Katz’s book investigates the heyday of a particular version of historicity, which is now giving way to a networked configuration of media events. Media witnessing introduces a bottom-up rather than top-down making of the event. The expan…
The mouse, the screen and the Holocaust witness
How do the aesthetic attributes of digital interfaces affect users’ ability to respond morally to the witnessing of suffering? Focusing on mainstream Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), this article proposes a phenomenology of user experience centred on the moral obligations of attending to, engaging with and acting upon digitized Holocaust survivor testimonies. The GUI, it argues, produces a regimen of eye–hand–screen relations that oscillates betw…
Visual frictions
Television audiences and transnational nostalgia
Nostalgia is a transnational condition. It not only describes temporal displacement from a vanished past but also spatial dislocation from a lost dwelling place: home. What happens, then, when the spatio-temporal dimensions of nostalgia are realigned by media globalization? Can the transnational consumption of media texts create memory-structures that allow viewers to feel ‘at home’ in a past that is not ‘theirs’? What might such a reconstitution…
Media witnessing and the ripeness of time
‘Media witnessing’ designates a new configuration of mediation, representation and experience that is involved in the transformation of our sense of historical significance. It refers to the witnessing performed in, by and through the media: the appearance of witnesses in media reports, the possibility of media themselves bearing witness and the positioning of media audiences as witnesses to depicted events. Media witnessing is defined by three o…
Phatic morality
This article attempts to expand Silverstone’s notion of ‘proper distance’ by asking what moral possibilities are ‘proper’ to aspects of mediation that are usually understood to be ‘distant’: impersonal, non-intimate and inattentive. Proper assessment of these low-intensity modes of mediation invites us to challenge the automatic assumption that moral sensibility has a necessary basis in audience attentiveness, intimacy and involvement with the re…
Framing Pictures, Picturing Frames
What does the conceptual indebtedness to visual metaphors portend for the study of communication? And what can be learned about the metaphoricity of concepts, and their impact upon analytical discourse, from the use of images and visual tropes in communication studies? Focusing on the place of the visual within the theoretical discourse of political communication research, this article asks whether reliance on key visual metaphors tends systemati…
Media Witnessing
From the Holocaust to 9/11, modern communications systems have incessantly exposed us to reports of distant and horrifying events, experienced by strangers, and brought to us through media technologie
ImagiNation
This article explores the ways in which television news broadcasts represent and construct nationhood in circumstances of protracted political and often military conflict. Such circumstances can lead to an affirmation of nationhood by foregrounding civil society rather than the state or organized politics: media representations turn the resilience of everyday interpersonal relationships into a conspicuous national value, and ultimately into a myt…
Media and events after Media Events
Media Events is a key text in explicating the relation between media and event insofar as it provides an account of time experienced through the structures and practices of broadcasting. We suggest that Dayan and Katz’s book investigates the heyday of a particular version of historicity, which is now giving way to a networked configuration of media events. Media witnessing introduces a bottom-up rather than top-down making of the event. The expan…
Crisis-Readiness and Media Witnessing
Contemporary media saturation requires us to rethink the notion of crisis. This paper characterizes crisis not in terms of isolable moments and significant events, but as a generalized and routine background condition—a persistent crisis-readiness. It is sustained and performed by a new media configuration: an assemblage of mediation, representation and experience that we call “media witnessing.” Focusing on how media witnessing foregrounds the i…
The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur
This paper argues that photography is best grasped not as a medium of visual communication, but as a manifest performance of the power to make visible. As such, photographic practices are central to the experience and demarcation of private/public boundaries in advanced media cultures. In the private domain, photography is both a ritualized domestic activity and provides conventional and definitive representations of the domestic. These functions…
The mouse, the screen and the Holocaust witness
How do the aesthetic attributes of digital interfaces affect users’ ability to respond morally to the witnessing of suffering? Focusing on mainstream Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), this article proposes a phenomenology of user experience centred on the moral obligations of attending to, engaging with and acting upon digitized Holocaust survivor testimonies. The GUI, it argues, produces a regimen of eye–hand–screen relations that oscillates betw…
Reviving icons to death
Iconic photographs possess broad social and symbolic significance, are widely replicated over time and circulated across media platforms, and fuel public discussion. In an era of digital memes, they have become generative resources for memetic performances that not only can draw on these images’ historic authority but can also undermine it. Based on the analysis of the ‘Accidental Napalm’ memes, our research leads to a fourfold taxonomy, from mem…
The “algorithmic as if
Contemporary artificial intelligence and algorithmic processes address deep-seated existential challenges and modes of desire. In so doing, they produce computational systems of imagination, an “algorithmic as if ” that enables the expression, transformation, and seeming overcoming of existential limitations via technological means. This article elaborates the character of the “algorithmic as if ” by focusing on Deep Nostalgia , an online tool th…
Covering Death in Conflicts
This exploratory study attempts to explain how journalistic routines for covering violent conflict lead to the construction of ethnocentric news. A distinction is made between two sets of routines. One set is permanent and ensures ethnocentric control over the flow of information, while a second set varies as journalists construct coherent narratives for particular events. This latter set of routines is further broken down into what are labeled t…
Covid-19
This is the Introduction to the special issue on Covid-19 and the cultural constructions of a global crisis. Contextualizing understandings of the pandemic in relation to the concepts of 'event' and 'crisis', especially to the idea that modernity is itself a condition of perpetual crisis, it proposes that the pandemic is a crisis-event that catalyses new possibilities for making visible endemic inequalities and injustices across highly variable c…
Phatic morality
This article attempts to expand Silverstone’s notion of ‘proper distance’ by asking what moral possibilities are ‘proper’ to aspects of mediation that are usually understood to be ‘distant’: impersonal, non-intimate and inattentive. Proper assessment of these low-intensity modes of mediation invites us to challenge the automatic assumption that moral sensibility has a necessary basis in audience attentiveness, intimacy and involvement with the re…
Inside the image factory
A substantial share of the photographs that are used in advertisements, product packaging, corporate marketing and website design are supplied by the stock photography business. Nevertheless, this global, billion-dollar industry, dominated by a handful of transnational corporations, remains largely invisible to consumers and has been almost totally neglected by cultural analysts. This article attempts to redress that neglect and lift the veil on …
Framing Pictures, Picturing Frames
What does the conceptual indebtedness to visual metaphors portend for the study of communication? And what can be learned about the metaphoricity of concepts, and their impact upon analytical discourse, from the use of images and visual tropes in communication studies? Focusing on the place of the visual within the theoretical discourse of political communication research, this article asks whether reliance on key visual metaphors tends systemati…
Rhetorics of the Overlooked
What produces the visual ground of intelligibility within consumer cultures, the environment of ‘banal’ images within which selected acts of attentiveness and specific encounters with arresting figures become possible? Taking a long-neglected industry - stock photography - as a key site for the creation of such an environment, this article explores this question, analysing the ways in which advertising and marketing photographs are promoted acros…
Penetrating Markets, Fortifying Fences
Research Article| September 01 2007 Penetrating Markets, Fortifying Fences: Advertising, Consumption, and Violent National Conflict Paul Frosh Paul Frosh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2007) 19 (3): 461–482. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2007-005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Paul Frosh; Penetrating Markets, Fortifying Fences: Advertising, Consumption, and V…
The expression of values on social media
Social media is a central arena for the articulation of values, shaping what people around the world deem important and desirable. However, traditional value typologies struggle to capture the dynamic nature of value expression in digital spheres and overlook new communication-related values prevalent in these environments. Addressing these gaps, we developed an analytical framework for investigating value expression on social media, comprising t…
The Face of Television
This article proposes some physiognomic speculations regarding three visual characteristics of television in its pre-digital-broadcasting form: (1) the importance of the head shot as a staple technique for representing the human figure and, hence, the primacy of the human face as a televisual image; (2) the mirrorlike reflective surface of the cathode-ray tube television screen, which makes the viewer’s reflected image appear to emanate from the …
From user-generated content to a user-generated aesthetic
This paper calls for renewed critical examination of the representational practices of commercial brands on social media, in particular their appropriation and adaptation of user-generated “amateur” or “vernacular” cultural styles. It proposes that this appropriation parallels processes of professionalization, influencer culture, and self-branding on social media. Focusing empirically on the official Instagram accounts of 12 leading fashion brand…
Sentient Photography
Thanks to the smartphone, photography has become pervasive in contemporary digital culture. Yet the smartphone’s very ‘smartness’ profoundly alters the relations of control between humans and technologies in image-production practices. Unlike dedicated cameras, smartphones use built-in sensors for small-scale positioning to ‘sense’ user’s bodily orientations and states of motion. Combined with photographic applications, this ‘sentience’ enables d…
Industrial ekphrasis
The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur
This paper argues that photography is best grasped not as a medium of visual communication, but as a manifest performance of the power to make visible. As such, photographic practices are central to the experience and demarcation of private/public boundaries in advanced media cultures. In the private domain, photography is both a ritualized domestic activity and provides conventional and definitive representations of the domestic. These functions…
Inside the image factory
A substantial share of the photographs that are used in advertisements, product packaging, corporate marketing and website design are supplied by the stock photography business. Nevertheless, this global, billion-dollar industry, dominated by a handful of transnational corporations, remains largely invisible to consumers and has been almost totally neglected by cultural analysts. This article attempts to redress that neglect and lift the veil on …
Rhetorics of the Overlooked
What produces the visual ground of intelligibility within consumer cultures, the environment of ‘banal’ images within which selected acts of attentiveness and specific encounters with arresting figures become possible? Taking a long-neglected industry - stock photography - as a key site for the creation of such an environment, this article explores this question, analysing the ways in which advertising and marketing photographs are promoted acros…
Industrial ekphrasis
ImagiNation
This article explores the ways in which television news broadcasts represent and construct nationhood in circumstances of protracted political and often military conflict. Such circumstances can lead to an affirmation of nationhood by foregrounding civil society rather than the state or organized politics: media representations turn the resilience of everyday interpersonal relationships into a conspicuous national value, and ultimately into a myt…
Penetrating Markets, Fortifying Fences
Research Article| September 01 2007 Penetrating Markets, Fortifying Fences: Advertising, Consumption, and Violent National Conflict Paul Frosh Paul Frosh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2007) 19 (3): 461–482. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2007-005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Paul Frosh; Penetrating Markets, Fortifying Fences: Advertising, Consumption, and V…
Media Witnessing
A Violent World
Covering Death in Conflicts
This exploratory study attempts to explain how journalistic routines for covering violent conflict lead to the construction of ethnocentric news. A distinction is made between two sets of routines. One set is permanent and ensures ethnocentric control over the flow of information, while a second set varies as journalists construct coherent narratives for particular events. This latter set of routines is further broken down into what are labeled t…
Media Witnessing
From the Holocaust to 9/11, modern communications systems have incessantly exposed us to reports of distant and horrifying events, experienced by strangers, and brought to us through media technologie
The Face of Television
This article proposes some physiognomic speculations regarding three visual characteristics of television in its pre-digital-broadcasting form: (1) the importance of the head shot as a staple technique for representing the human figure and, hence, the primacy of the human face as a televisual image; (2) the mirrorlike reflective surface of the cathode-ray tube television screen, which makes the viewer’s reflected image appear to emanate from the …
Crisis-Readiness and Media Witnessing
Contemporary media saturation requires us to rethink the notion of crisis. This paper characterizes crisis not in terms of isolable moments and significant events, but as a generalized and routine background condition—a persistent crisis-readiness. It is sustained and performed by a new media configuration: an assemblage of mediation, representation and experience that we call “media witnessing.” Focusing on how media witnessing foregrounds the i…
Phatic morality
This article attempts to expand Silverstone’s notion of ‘proper distance’ by asking what moral possibilities are ‘proper’ to aspects of mediation that are usually understood to be ‘distant’: impersonal, non-intimate and inattentive. Proper assessment of these low-intensity modes of mediation invites us to challenge the automatic assumption that moral sensibility has a necessary basis in audience attentiveness, intimacy and involvement with the re…
Framing Pictures, Picturing Frames
What does the conceptual indebtedness to visual metaphors portend for the study of communication? And what can be learned about the metaphoricity of concepts, and their impact upon analytical discourse, from the use of images and visual tropes in communication studies? Focusing on the place of the visual within the theoretical discourse of political communication research, this article asks whether reliance on key visual metaphors tends systemati…
Media witnessing and the ripeness of time
‘Media witnessing’ designates a new configuration of mediation, representation and experience that is involved in the transformation of our sense of historical significance. It refers to the witnessing performed in, by and through the media: the appearance of witnesses in media reports, the possibility of media themselves bearing witness and the positioning of media audiences as witnesses to depicted events. Media witnessing is defined by three o…
Visual frictions
Television audiences and transnational nostalgia
Nostalgia is a transnational condition. It not only describes temporal displacement from a vanished past but also spatial dislocation from a lost dwelling place: home. What happens, then, when the spatio-temporal dimensions of nostalgia are realigned by media globalization? Can the transnational consumption of media texts create memory-structures that allow viewers to feel ‘at home’ in a past that is not ‘theirs’? What might such a reconstitution…
The mouse, the screen and the Holocaust witness
How do the aesthetic attributes of digital interfaces affect users’ ability to respond morally to the witnessing of suffering? Focusing on mainstream Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), this article proposes a phenomenology of user experience centred on the moral obligations of attending to, engaging with and acting upon digitized Holocaust survivor testimonies. The GUI, it argues, produces a regimen of eye–hand–screen relations that oscillates betw…
Reviving icons to death
Iconic photographs possess broad social and symbolic significance, are widely replicated over time and circulated across media platforms, and fuel public discussion. In an era of digital memes, they have become generative resources for memetic performances that not only can draw on these images’ historic authority but can also undermine it. Based on the analysis of the ‘Accidental Napalm’ memes, our research leads to a fourfold taxonomy, from mem…
Media and events after Media Events
Media Events is a key text in explicating the relation between media and event insofar as it provides an account of time experienced through the structures and practices of broadcasting. We suggest that Dayan and Katz’s book investigates the heyday of a particular version of historicity, which is now giving way to a networked configuration of media events. Media witnessing introduces a bottom-up rather than top-down making of the event. The expan…
From User Generated Content to a User Generated Aesthetic
Recent research has emphasized the increasing professionalization of ‘user-generated content’ for digital networks and social media. This paper highlights a contrary but parallel process: the aesthetic ‘vernacularization’ of brand images on social media and the adoption of recognizably ‘amateur’ styles by corporate brands. Analyzing the official Instagram accounts of 24 leading fashion brands between 2014-18, our research project identified eight…
"Taste This Video!"
Videos are among the most widely used media formats on Facebook. Yet little research has been done on their aesthetic and formal attributes, and especially on how they operate within the frameworks of attention, interruption and embodied interaction specific to social media interfaces. This paper examines recipe videos published on Tasty, one of the most popular Facebook pages in the world. We analyze these videos through a novel three-dimensiona…
Reliving Memories (Over and Over Again)
This paper examines potential changes in the temporal experience of everyday digital media through the smartphone photo album. Smartphone photo albums not only organize and display domestic photographs but also initiate temporally novel photographic formats: for instance, the images taken by users can be used as raw material in the production of new kinds of ‘moving’ or ‘animated’ photographic products, usually formatted as GIF files and characte…
What Does #Freedom Look Like? Instagram and the Visual Imagination of Values
Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as compassion or freedom. While visualizing the abstract is not new, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. In this paper, we address an unexplored question about this process: which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Ins…
What Does #Freedom Look Like? Instagram and the Visual Imagination of Values
Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as freedom. Over the past decade, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. Drawing on an epistemology of social constructionism, we ask which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Instagram. We studied 20 widely used value has…
Sociology (29 obras) · Art (21 obras) · Computer Science (19 obras) · Political science (18 obras) · Psychology (16 obras) · Aesthetics (15 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Visual arts (11 obras) · Visual Culture and Art Theory (11 obras) · Epistemology (10 obras)