5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

This session welcomes contributions working on the way in which social media platforms are transforming the imaginary of the violence of war, fostering a specific emotional approach to violence. For example, social media platforms can offer a space to rationalize tragic circumstances through participatory practices of content production and circulation, where playfulness and irreverent humour can be used to collectively process cultural trauma, producing emotional distance from concrete violence. The visual material circulates in a media ecosystem that records a wide variety of forms of representation of war, of different kind and in different contexts. Nevertheless, in most cases, this occurs in a social context that has not had an ontological relationship to the reality of war for generations. Moreover, the rapidity and brevity of fruition make the circulation of these images particularly devoid of historical depth.

Hence, the session is interested in exploring : a) to what extent this can produce an emotional domestication of the violence of war; b) the generational dimension of this social process, that is, its impact on younger generations and their perception of the violence of war; c) the connection between the fruition of the images of war in the social media and the normalization of the discourse about war in the public space.