My one slide deck presented at Social Data London @ Twitter UK on September 29th. This is part of a larger study we are conducting at the Visual Social Media Lab http://visualsocialmedialab.org The study focuses on the images of three-year old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi taken by a Turkish press photographer after his body was found on Bodrum beach in Turkey, 1 September 2015. These images were distributed to the mainstream media via wire services and subsequently circulated widely on social media, triggering further online and offline responses. These responses appear to have been driven by the accumulated momentum of the images as they were circulated and used across different contexts. This rapid response project – involving researchers from the lab as well as elsewhere – explores this phenomenon and uses this case to consider the wider role of social media in the contemporary creation of iconic images. In relation to the Aylan Kurdi images in particular, the study explores how the affective power of these images prompted people to do things (to volunteer or become actively involved in the #refugeeswelcome campaign, for example) and what role did social media play in these processes. The project also considers these images from a broader historical perspective, by exploring how they reiterate longer-standing iconic motifs and how social media users themselves linked the images to iconic photographs from the past.

1. January 1st
April 22nd Sept 2nd
Tweets by day mentioning Migrants (+8M) vs Refugees (+11M)
Source: Pulsar / Visual Social Media Lab 2015
How a single image changed the debate on immigration
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