Osman Burak Tosun

A researcher who wrote her thesis about television series (musalsalat in Arabic) aired in Syria, and unluckily faced the grim reality of the Syrian Civil War, Donatella Della Ratta gives us a solid and undeniably unique work about transforming aesthetics of propaganda videos, TV shows, and images circulating in new media and the cross-referencing, reviving and everchanging modern myths of a postmodern revolution. Even if her intentions were not related to writing a book about the transformation of new media in a civil war, she states that her deep emotional bond with the Syrian people living in agony, her long-running ethnographic research about visual culture in Syria and her first-hand testimonies from the very first days of peaceful protests in 2011 would have made her write a book about it. Shooting a Revolution offers readers a broad theoretical discussion about the transformation of contemporary conflicts in the age of networked visual culture and helps to frame a more informed debate on the current situation in Syria.