Facebook and the Napalm Girl: Reframing the Iconic as Pornographic

Abstract

Facebook’s banning of the photo of the iconic Napalm Girl before it was reinstated due to public criticism of the social networking facility was a symbolic and material act of incursion on the sacred. It underscored the prowess of the technology firm as a platform for content sharing from breaking news to banal images where millions of images are shared and integrated through networked relationships and its circulation economy, re-framing and re-configuring social memory, history and morality. More importantly, it asserted the “technological gaze” of Facebook where its system of managing content can turn the sacred into puerile and the puerile into popular entertainment, flattening, and re-mapping content through its own moral sensibilities. This Facebook economy imposes its own morality through its “technological gaze,” and in the process thwarts our “projects of memory” opening up wider ethical challenges for society and humanity.