The Koenig article was disturbing to me. I think it’s the idea that everyone knows what’s about to happen to people, and all we can do is take a picture of it after it happens (or record it happening). We’re planning trials while the victims are still alive. But what else should people do? It feels like the effort should be pointed towards some other goal but what?

On the worst thing that happened to you being turned into data that you have no control over:

The Talebi et al. article about social media and Nigerian refugees reminded me of the papers from last week about Black Lives Matter and social media. Social media gets blame for radicalizing people, but sometimes it “radicalizes” people into pro-democracy movements and sometimes it is a way for people to tell their own stories.

I worked with a youth group for teenagers who were placed in the United States as refugees. They were working on a presentation to teach people more about where they came from (like special foods, holidays, stuff like that). But they found this picture of the refugee camp they grew up in and one of their friends was in it, crying (it was a crowd of people right after they arrived at the camp and their friend was a young child in it). They were furious. It really hurt them that a photo like that was out there and they had no control over it. They told us to never let anyone see the photo. They insisted that their friend should never know about it. It was startling to see how serious they were because they were normally typical funny teenagers.

I thought about it when I read “another limitation of the current study is that it did not examine how social media could be used for self-care among victims of conflict” in the conclusion of Talebi et al. This happened before social media was such a part of everyday life and before good camera phones. Now, they would have the option of posting their own photographs and I wonder how that might have changed their experience and how they would present themselves.