Abstract

On the night of December 6th 2008, at the edges of Exarcheia Square in central Athens, Greece, a 15-year old student was shot dead by a police officer, following what turned out to be a not so casual Saturday night argle-bargle between a police patrol and a group of youths. Within hours of the incident, hundreds of enraged teenage and twenty-something youths would take to the streets of Athens and what would start as impromptu protests over the boy’s death would soon escalate into the worst rioting Greece has witnessed since the restoration of democracy in 1974.
Being digital natives and capitalizing on the micropublishing opportunities that Web 2.0 offers, the young rioters would use mobile-phone technology and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace to mobilize people at home and abroad and provide updates of the news-in-the-making by twittering and blogging, illustrated by a constant stream of “authentic” snaps.
This paper examined how photographs of riots and conflict taken by citizens may be circulated and recontextualised online as eye-witness documents affording alternative, allegedly more “democratic” reporting to mainstream news coverage. It also investigated how this personalization of the news may function as a participatory act in the making of collective history. Issues of authenticity and credibility, subjectiveness and sentimentality, crudeness and amateurisation as well as aesthetic considerations in the construction of meaning and ideology were central to the argument.