What is the point of changing your Facebook profile picture to a French flag?
It is shocking, but death, terrorism and murder have become a normative image when we (in the western world) think about the Middle East. By contrast, and exemplified by the reactions to Friday’s attacks on Paris by social media and mainstream news, such attacks in western cities are received with total horror, fear and anger. For most people going about their daily lives in busy European cities, such attacks are assumed to occur predominantly in distant war zones and countries which are not politically stable. More and more, it is becoming clear that this imagined distance is just that, and that terrorism is becoming increasingly transnational. Friday’s attacks on Paris have, once again, brought the concept of terrorism and the danger of spontaneous death, through no fault of one’s own, into the forefront of many people’s minds. We are aware that such attacks are extremely difficult to predict and prevent. This fear of impending danger is heightened by the fact that Friday’s events took place in re
Nov 16, 2015 ... If you aren't personally affected by the attacks in Paris, then putting a filter on your profile picture can look a lot like a superficial repetition of a ...