The People Are Not an Image: Vernacular Video After the Arab Spring pdf

Peter Snowdon is a contemporary historian and journalist. Educated at St. Dunstan's College, Durham University and the London School of Economics, he has collaborated with Anthony Seldon on a number of books, including the authorised biography of John Major, Major: A Political Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), Blair (Simon & Schuster, 2004) and Blair Unbound (Simon & Schuster, 2007).[1] He has written articles on the Conservative Party in several academic journals, including The Political Quarterly and Parliamentary Affairs. He has also contributed to Parliamentary Monitor, Parliamentary Brief and Newsweek. He is an occasional columnist for the Yorkshire Post and has appeared as a commentator on television and radio in the UK and abroad. He currently works for BBC political programmes, having previously worked at London Weekend Television.

The People Are Not an Image: Vernacular Video After the Arab Spring pdf by Peter Snowdon

The wave of uprisings and revolutions that swept the Middle East and North Africa between 2010 and 2012 were most vividly transmitted throughout the world not by television or even social media, but in short videos produced by the participants themselves and circulated anonymously on the internet.
In The People Are Not an Image, Snowdon explores this radical shift in revolutionary self-representation, showing that the political consequences of these videos cannot be located without reference to their aesthetic form. Looking at videos from Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and Egypt, Snowdon attends closely to the circumstances of both their production and circulation, drawing on a wide range of historical and theoretical material, to discover what they can tell us about the potential for revolution in our time and the possibilities of video as a genuinely decentralised and vernacular medium.