Frames of Death: Media Audience Framing of a Lethal Drone Strike

Abstract

The rise of drone warfare intersects with the rise of YouTube and has become a natural place for distributing videos of war and death. Audience participation has an important role to play in framing killing and death in the dissemination of war propaganda in the age of drone warfare and participatory media. In this chapter, the way in which audiences are framing the media message of a video clip of a lethal drone strike uploaded to YouTube is analyzed.The killing is ascribed meaning through two cultural frames, seeing the killing either as legitimate or illegitimate. The first audience framing constructs a moral response where death through drone strike is justified, and the uploader's framing is considered legitimate, constituting the killed lives as unlivable. An aesthetic and affectual response to the justified killing is a spectatorial gaze where the death through drone strike killing is enjoyed as drone porn. The second audience framing contests the uploader's frame as illegitimate and constitutes the lives as livable. The aesthetic and affectual response to the contested kill is a spectatorial gaze where these deaths are responded to through sadness, and disgust, as drone horror.The study of how death (and thus, life) is ascribed meaning through the framing in participatory cultures online shows the characteristics of war propaganda in a time pervaded by highly technologized warfare, by discourses of terrorism and by new digital modes for communication and information.