Just imagine your phone rings. One sentence. Then the person hangs up on you. The tragedy starts. Just a few minutes later someone – or better: something – knocks on your house. Not on your door, on your house! It`s a small rocket hitting the top of your home. No explosion. Not yet. ROOF KNOCKING. From now on you have about two minutes to get the f… out of here.
Or, as this video from Gaza shows, maybe only 35 SECONDS. BOOM.
When you look at this from a social anthropological perspective, it also tells you a lot about power. People take #Selfies, but armies and states in war rely on #Otheries: the one-dimensional focus on the Other, as a target, as an object of war. Here`s a fieldnote from Andreas Hackl on Othering in the current Israeli military operation in Gaza: http://transformations-blog.com/who-cares-about-selfies-its-the-otherie-stupid/.
Not #Selfies, but #Otheries.
„It is this perspective from far outside the reality on the ground, from above the sky, looking only through a one-dimensional frame with a cross-hair in the middle, which inspired me to introduce a new mechanism in our increasingly self-righteous world: not the #Selfie, but the #Otherie.“ (Andreas Hackl)
Great read!