“The image speaks for itself” – or does it? Instant news icons,impromptu publics,and the 2015 European “refugee crisis”

A contested concept

“Icon” is a contested concept, involving a range of potentials and challenges. Applied to everything from religious artifacts to Mona Lisa to Michael Jackson to Coca Cola to influential photojournalistic images, “icon” is, as Andreas Drechsel (2010) emphasizes, “an oscillating term and its popularity may well be due at least in part to its vagueness” (p. 5). Interpretations of what counts as an icon may be more or less exclusive: How many recipients should be familiar with the image for this label to be appropriate? For how long should an icon be recognized as such? Where should the line be drawn between “iconic” images vis-à-vis “influential”, “important”, and “famous” ones? Definitions of icons that seek to provide definite answers to these questions run the risk of being too rigid since there is not, as Martin Kemp (2012) argues, “some clear and definable boundary that the image crosses when it moves from being very famous to fully iconic” (p. 3). Another complication is that assigning the concept of “icon” to a particular image invariably evokes a performative aspect. Icons become icons, at least in part, because they are named as such. Research on the subject therefore takes part in constructing its own object of study. Considering the weight usually carried by icons, scholarly engagement with “icons” inevitably makes a claim concerning the prominence of the image in question. This is also coupled with methodological challenges. Definitions of icons emphasize their power and impact. But how are “power” and “impact” to be defined, theoretically underpinned, and empirically verified?

While taking these reservations into account, this article deploys the term “icon”, in part for pragmatic reasons. By which other term should we refer to the intensely disseminated, renowned images commonly known as “icons”? Furthermore, the conceptual elusiveness may to a certain extent be explained by the broad and popular use of the term, not only across various scholarly fields but also in media and everyday communication. Research on icons at least ideally creates a platform for critical reflection upon how this notion is used in vernacular communication. An additional reason for sticking with this term is that it helps ground the current construction and mobilization of influential images in historical and cultural perspectives. Moreover, studying “icons” brings questions of power to the forefront. Whether historical or contemporary, icons are tied explicitly to issues of power in popular discourse and scholarship alike. “Icon” is applied to images that have an impact on agenda setting, public opinion, political decision-making processes, etc. Accordingly, the term makes space for investigating the relationship between particularly influential images, media, politics, and citizens and/or audiences in cross-cultural and cross-national contexts.

Another advantage of preserving the term is that the rich research conducted on icons in the mass media era provides an important stepping-stone for conceptualizing instant news icons. Coming from diverse disciplines such as history (Brink, 2000), rhetoric (Hariman & Lucaites, 2007), political science (Perlmutter, 1998), and communication/media studies (Bennett & Lawrence, 1995; Mortensen, 2013), scholarship on this subject has studied icons in terms of their aesthetics and communicative modes as well as their bearing on media, politics, and popular culture. The present article’s theoretical and analytical approaches to instant news icons draw strongly upon the work by Bennett and Lawrence (1995), Brink (2000), and Hariman and Lucaites (2007) to identify how the digital media landscape reconditions and redefines iconic images.

Instant news icons: transient images, impromptu publics

This article offers the following definition of instant news icons: They are selected images, which through rapid and wide dissemination across media platforms become frames of reference for a large, sometimes even global, public. Usually they emerge in connection with situations or phenomena that already have status as news or media events. But they may also generate and drive these events themselves. Convergence between the news media and social network sites as well as the more active role assumed by media users are instrumental in the distribution and mobilization of instant news icons.

The “instant news icon” concept focuses on the context of news, and the area of inquiry is delimited from diverse religious and cultural contexts, in which different kinds of icons and conceptualizations of them occur. The news context also determines the genres and aesthetics of instant news icons, which predominantly fall within photojournalistic and documentary traditions. Regardless of whether they are taken by professional or non-professional photographers/photojournalists, instant news icons typically conform to the “realistic” and “authentic” style of photojournalism and documentary. Another important clarification is that “news” is understood in a broad sense, involving not only the news media and professional journalism but also alternative platforms for distributing news stories, such as social network sites, blogs, YouTube, and other sites for sharing videos and images as well as actors other than professional media workers taking part in the production and dissemination of news stories/images, such as citizens, activists, celebrities, and political actors.

“Instant news icon” is inspired by the term “news icon” introduced by W. Lance Bennett and Regina Lawrence in 1995. ¹ News icons, according to Bennett and Lawrence, include both visual images and what they call “word pictures”. In contrast, the “instant news icon” concept points exclusively to visual images. Although the inclusion of linguistic icons would open up possibilities for analysis into the intricate interplay between images and words, this would, from the perspective of this article, create too diffuse a concept, bearing in mind the different grammars, distributive patterns, and reception modes of visual and verbal/written communication. “News icons” refer to the “emblematic decisive moments” captured by the camera, as Bennett and Lawrence (1995, p. 26) write with reference to the catchphrase “the decisive moment”, coined by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. They often “arise in their original contexts purely by accident” (Bennett & Lawrence, 1995, p. 24, see also Hariman & Lucaites, 2007; Mortensen, 2015) and retain a strong claim to representing reality because they usually show what seem to be spontaneous situations in a realistic, simple, and straightforward manner. At the same time, icons are deployed “by journalists to evoke larger cultural themes, symbolizing values, contradictions, or changes that have begun to surface in society” (Bennett & Lawrence, 1995, p. 23) or, as Alexander (2015) puts it, iconic images are “symbolic condensations” (p. 4). They transcend the (seemingly) spontaneous and specific situation represented on account of their affective appeal, intertextual references, and symbolic allusions to well-known tensions or conflicts in society (see also Hariman & Lucaites, 2007). Cornelia Brink (2000) similarly observes that icons possess both “authenticity” and “symbolization”. By the same token, instant news icons represent and are coupled with a particular occurrence in time and space yet also exceed the specificity of the event and symbolize larger, ongoing crises in society. However, there is one central difference between news icons and instant news icons in this regard. Bennett and Lawrence (1995) note that news icons either prompt consent or contestation in their representation of salient societal challenges: “[M]any icons celebrate accepted cultural values and orientation. […] but some icons raise cultural tensions and contradictions” (p. 23). The publics surrounding iconic images in the digital era are neither as unified nor as homogenous as in the era of mainstream media dominance. Instant news icons do not spark consent or contestation but usually both consent and contestation; we shall return to one clear example of this in the analysis.

While indebted to Bennett and Lawrence’s (1995) term “news icon” as far as the context of news and the duplicity of authenticity and symbolization are concerned, it is necessary to look into digital processes of distribution and mobilization in order to gain a more complete understanding of instant news icons. In the following, change introduced by instant news icons is structured along two dimensions: time (how fast they are spread, how long they endure) and space (how they generate and are themselves generated by online publics).

An instant news icon from the 2015 European “refugee crisis”: the case, the methods

“‘The refugee’ is a figure which is always imagined in the context of borders.” This observation by Anna Szörényi (2006, p. 24) resonates with the photographs of the six-year old Iranian refugee girl, Noor Al-Saedi, and a police officer playing “where is the ring” on the motorway just north of the Danish border with Germany. Claus Fisker for the Scanpix agency and freelance photographer Michael Drost-Hansen both captured several photographs of this scene, which were first published by the Danish newspapers BT and Jyllands-Posten on September 9, 2015. ² Two million Danes (out of the 5.7 million population) were said to have seen the photographs on the day of their release (e.g. Zahle, 2015). Moreover, the images were circulated and left a strong impression outside of the national borders. For example, the Washington Post claimed they were among the “most powerful images of Europe’s migrant emergency” (Kirkpatrick, 2015). The images refer to a highly unusual situation. In September 2015, refugees crossed the border from Germany in mass numbers and wandered along the motorway, which needed to be closed to cars. Many of the refugees intended to walk the 300-or-so kilometers (186 miles) from the border to Copenhagen, after which they could pass to Sweden, but they were eventually picked up by buses and other means of mass transport. This created an urgent national situation, which reflected the international state of emergency in relation to what was termed the “refugee crisis”. ³ Press attention was immense.

This case has not been chosen because it represents a situation particular to the Danish media or political system. On the contrary, the case has been selected because it refers to the larger transnational crisis situation of refugees from Syria, Iran, and other countries crossing the Mediterranean and entering Europe, which had already been a major story in the international news media for months by the time the images were published. Moreover, the case is of particular interest in the context of icons because the child as victim of war and other crisis situations constitutes a familiar motif for this branch of images. Nick Ut’s 1972 “napalm girl” photograph from the Vietnam War and the aforementioned images of the drowned refugee boy, Alan Kurdi, also from 2015, constitute famous historical and contemporary examples of this. Furthermore, coverage of refugees and other humanitarian crises relies strongly on visual representations. “[C]ompassion depends on visuals,” Höijer (2004, p. 520) claims, while Bleiker, Campbell, Hutchison, and Nicholson (2011) argue that images of refugees “shape perceptions of and responsibilities towards asylum seekers” and “frame political discussions on the topic” (p. 399).

The images of the young refugee girl and the police officer live up to the definition of instant news icons offered above: They show a scene seemingly grabbed spontaneously out of reality, which at the same time carries symbolic meanings and intertextual references repeatedly brought up in their receptions across media platforms. The images are related to the topical, much-debated situation of the refugee exodus and sparked significant, albeit quickly fading, attention in the news media and social network sites nationally and internationally. Soon proclaimed to be iconic, these images were intensely shared and commented upon in the days after their release. On the day following their publication, newspapers addressed the pictures as though everybody would or should know of them.

As indicated above, studying icons involves methodological challenges, which researchers have sought to overcome by applying various approaches such as opinion surveys (Perlmutter, 1998), audience recognition (Spratt, Peterson, & Lagos, 2005), content analysis (Mortensen, 2015), and rhetorical analysis (Hariman & Lucaites, 2007). The spread of the images across multiple platforms and some 48 countries highlighted the urgency of these methodological challenges. It quickly became evident that it would not be feasible to acquire a complete overview yet that studying one particular context could be criticized as being random or too narrow. Instead of choosing either breadth or depth, I opted for a middle course, which combines quantitative and qualitative methods to study material from three distinct sources: First, a student assistant deployed the Google Reverse Image Search tool to create a quantitative overview of the images’ distribution across vastly different regional contexts and media platforms in the period from the day of the images’ release on September 9, 2015 to two months later, November 9. Second, 30 articles published on the subject in major Danish newspapers were identified using the Infomedia database (again in the period September 9-November 9, 2015) and were subjected to qualitative analysis. Third, comments on the social media platforms Imgur and reddit were qualitatively analyzed. Unlike social media such as Facebook and Instagram, Imgur and reddit do not primarily take their point of departure from the private sphere but instead from clips in the news and popular media, which users discuss and comment upon.

By combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies as well as three analytical contexts, the article aims to provide empirical insight into the impromptu formation of publics surrounding instant news icons as well as into how emotions drive different patterns of response, which may either build upon consent (newspapers) or dissent (social media).

Around the world in a few days

The first part of the analysis provides an overview of how much and how far the images spread. Giving precise numbers is difficult as the results vary depending upon the technological tools and methods employed. For example, using the search terms “refugee”, “girl”, “Danish”, and “police officer” generates 512,000 hits on Google; 78,000 on Google News; and 36,100 on Bing, not all of these hits are relevant to the case. However, obtaining exact numbers was less important than forming a general idea of how the images were shared, i.e. proportions in the division between different national/regional contexts. To this end, Google Reverse Image Search was deployed. This generates significantly lower hits than other search engines because this tool measures how many times the images were actually shared and not just referred to or commented upon.

The results facilitated by Google Reverse Image Search provide an overview of the geographical spread of the images. A source of error in the Google Reverse Image Search is that a series of photographs of the same incident were circulated (even if the coverage mostly refers to them as just one image). Three of the most-shared images were applied to this tool. Obviously, the numbers would have been higher had the search included all of the images. It was not possible to generate numbers concerning the shares between media platforms because the diversity of languages and national variations in content and graphic layout made it difficult to distinguish between, for instance, news sites and social media sites. Moreover, it has not been possible to gather information concerning the extent to which the numbers generated by Google Image Reverse Search are inclusive, i.e. reflect the actual number of times the images have been shared. However, as noted above, the numbers may still highlight a general pattern in the diffusion of the images.

According to Google Reverse Image Search, the three images were shared a total of 1193 times in approximately 48 countries in the period September 9-November 9, 2015. China was the country in which they were shared the most, 21% (shared 254 times), followed by Turkey 15% (175 times), the United States 12% (148 times), Iran 11% (127 times), Spain 7% (84 times), and Denmark 6% (66 times). The remaining countries amount to less than 5% each. These proportions indicate that the sharing follows the model of the big head and long tail, in so far as the national contexts in which they were shared the most amount to 72% (i.e. “the big head”) while the remaining 28% are divided between 42 countries, each with a share of less than five percent (i.e. “the long tail”). Another interesting point to be deduced from these numbers is that the country of origin, Denmark, is only in sixth place, which should of course be taken with the reservation that Denmark is a small country, especially compared to China and the USA. The geographical spread is also remarkable in so far as the four countries in which the images were shared the most (China, Turkey, USA, and Iran) cover different continents, along with entirely different media systems and forms of government. These numbers obviously only give an indication of how the images circulated around the world and not why, by whom, and on which types of platforms. Nonetheless, they sketch out a general pattern of how this instant news icon spread virally and rather unpredictably across national contexts.

News media (meta)coverage of the self-explanatory, instant news icon

By deploying qualitative approaches in the two next sections, the analysis becomes more narrow and focused. We first turn to the 30 articles included in the coverage in Danish newspapers, which devotes scant attention to the facts and background behind the story of the girl and her family. Noor Al-Saedi is widely reported to be Syrian, when in fact she is Iranian, and details as to how and why her family fled their home country are recounted in just a few articles, all of which use an article printed in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet as their source of information (see e.g. Vissing, 2015). Moreover, thorough engagement with the complex of problems and differences of opinion related to the so-called “refugee crisis” are virtually non-existent. Instead, the newspapers resort to “metacoverage”, that is, coverage not dealing explicitly with the content and implications of the case but instead indulging in self-referential and self-reflexive accounts of how the case was framed by newspapers and other news media as well as by users on social network sites (see e.g. Esser, 2009; Mortensen, 2015). In this case, metacoverage foregrounds the communicative circuit involved in promoting the instant news icon by dwelling on how famous the images have become, in how short a time, and how much and widely they have been dispersed via social media. To quote a typical statement, “the picture has been used by international and national media, and has especially been vividly retweeted, shared and commented upon in social media” (Attardo & Paulsen, 2015). ⁴ Metacoverage is accompanied by repeated claims about the image “speaking for itself”, with the underlying assumption, it seems, that this instant news icon is self-explanatory. In particular, the police, when asked to comment on the great notice sparked by this image, are quoted for several statements to this effect, such as the following: “We’re very happy about it – how we’re being praised. And the picture clearly speaks for itself.” The police officer himself (who remains unnamed in the coverage) has no further comment, apart from reiterating that the “image speaks for itself” (Bakalus, 2015b). The recurring assertions that the image “speaks for itself” are all the more striking in light of how the articles frequently use the word “world”, for example, in phrases such as “hits wildly worldwide” (Bakalus, 2015b) and “travels around the world” (recurrent expression, e.g. Vissing, 2015). This indicates that the proclaimed unity of reception is worldwide.

Along with general statements about the self-explanatory icon spreading worldwide, the metacoverage follows two distinct storylines. While they both emerge from emotional responses to the images, their levels of engagement and commitment are distinctly different: The first concerns a message of humanitarianism and the second focuses on the police officer attracting female attention.

First, many newspaper articles highlight the humanitarianism symbolically communicated by the images:

The Danish police officer has become a symbol of humanity in the midst of the humanitarian catastrophe, which has reached Europe in the form of refugees about which nobody really knows what to do (Hartung, 2015).

This interpretation of the police officer as a “symbol of humanity” on account of his interaction with the young girl is in line with representations of refugees constituting a major theme in the humanitarian tradition within photojournalism and documentary photography, e.g. the canonical work by Dorothea Lang and Sebastião Salgado. Refugee children occupy a special place within this tradition because they are seen to be “ideal victims”: vulnerable, innocent, in need of protection, and evoking “a strong emotional impact” (Seu, 2015, p. 663). Depictions of children tend to depoliticize and decontextualize refugees and their situation in so far as children are perceived to be lacking political agency, and they shift attention from the specificity of the circumstances to general emotional responses, for instance of pity and compassion (see also Boltanski, 1999; Chouliaraki, 2006, 2012; Wright, 2002). As Marisa O. Ensor (2010) remarks:

Children’s pre- and postmigration circumstances, as well as their complex cultural, socioeconomic, and educational needs, tend to be ignored. Victimhood is thus seen as universally constitutive of the child migrant (p. 21).

Along these lines, the coverage is preoccupied with how this touching scene has moved spectators worldwide. These emotions seem attributable in particular to how the refugee child is interacting with an official authority, the police officer, offering her temporary protection and comfort in this interim stop on her flight.

The humanitarian interpretation is underscored by the newspapers paying great attention to the images’ intertextual references to other influential depictions of refugees in the fall of 2015. Drawing comparison to preceding icons is a typical feature in the reception of icons, which Lene Hansen (2015, p. 296) terms their “inter-iconity”, with reference to Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality. For example, social media expert Benjamin Rud Elberth is quoted as saying:

This is a fantastic photo. There are so many feelings in it, and it hits an incredibly dry spot. The Danes are hungering for something besides a man spitting from bridge, a dead boy on the shore, refugees kept off a motorway, and other of the horror scenarios we are experiencing at the moment (Zahle, 2015).

The first picture mentioned by Elberth stems from the Danish context and attracted huge attention as well. Released two days earlier, it depicts the same stretch of motorway. However, this photograph shows a diametrically opposed Danish welcome to refugees: A man, quickly dubbed “the spitting man” (spyttemanden), stands on a motorway bridge and spits at the refugees passing beneath. This image was greeted with national and international contempt and condemnation because it was seen as a symbolic manifestation of some Danes’ latent xenophobia and the Danish government’s restrictive attitude towards refugees. In both the international and the national news coverage, the disparity between the two images was interpreted as a symptom of a country split between hospitality and hostility towards refugees. The second imagery to which Elberth refers is the aforementioned photographs of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy who died during his family’s flight across the Mediterranean. In one of the images of Kurdi, the body of the infant boy is carried by a police officer, which allows for the same juxtaposition between the refugee child and a representative from the authorities. However, there is a stark contrast between the grim and appalling images of Kurdi and the hope of humanitarianism and solidarity conceived by the Danish ones (at least according to the newspaper coverage).

While the humanitarian interpretation accords with the empirical context and circumstances of these images, the second storyline in the news coverage goes more “off topic” and conforms to a soft-news logic when focusing on how the police officer reportedly “charms the entire world” (Attardo, 2015). The following quote from the tabloid BT, with the telling caption “Danish police officer flooded with marriage offers from the world’s women: I would also cross the border for him”, is telling of this strand of newspaper coverage:

The sweet photo has touched the hearts of many Danes. But the nice police officer is also a hit outside of the country’s border, after the picture has been shared at lightning speed on social media. Foreign users, however, are more preoccupied with the police officer, whose looks many find utterly attractive (Bakalus, 2015a).

This approach turns the police officer into an object of admiration and desire. Bearing in mind the way in which icons negotiate individual and collective identities in relation to societal crises or tensions, it is of course interesting that this figure is perceived as an official authority – “the police officer”. However, he is not treated as a representative of a particular system or national context but rather as someone performing a general role in an amicable way.

To summarize, the newspapers turn coverage into metacoverage and refrain from getting into specific explanations or discussions about the case or the urgent political challenges facing Denmark and the rest of Europe due to the refugee exodus. Instead, they dwell on the emotions stirred – of humanitarianism and attraction – within the impromptu publics mobilized by these images. By centering on these emotions, the newspapers emphasize the patterns for identification with the girl, the police officer, or the interaction between the two. The newspapers primarily cite social media as sources of information for this (meta)coverage, which makes it all the more interesting to turn to the third and final part of this analysis, focusing on the reception of the series of images on two selected social network sites.

Social media response: divided opinions and meta-reflexivity

This section concerns responses to the images of the police officer and the young refugee girl on Imgur and reddit, which were chosen because the quantitative analysis performed using Google Image Reverse Search pointed to these social network sites as among the most popular outlets for disseminating and debating the images. ⁵ To ensure consistency, the analysis is based on the same three images as the ones applied to the Google Reverse Image Search. The following analysis deduces some overriding patterns from the comment threads. They are particularly interesting for presenting a perspective on the Danish news coverage, which drew extensively on this social media content as source material but only focused on the affirmative aspects, either in terms of the humanitarian framing or the personal appeal of the police officer.

Of the three images, two show the scenes to which the news coverage was referring – of the police officer and the young girl playing together on the motorway. The third image, however, presents their interaction from a different perspective. They are both standing up and smiling, but the police officer is pointing his index finger at the girl as if mildly reprimanding her. It is worthy of note that this photo generated by far the most comments on both Imgur (849 comments and 1,598,086 views) ⁶ and reddit (1233 comments, views not stated), ⁷ with the other two photos receiving fewer than 100 comments each on the two sites (all numbers as of August 22, 2016). This is symptomatic of how social media users foreground the negative, conflictual aspects of the series of photographs. As another indication of this tendency, the image is published on reddit under the, it seems, satirical and critical caption “Danish Police Officer Has Had Enough of Syrian Girl who Crossed the Border Illegally”.

To an extent, the comments on reddit and Imgur confirm the Danish newspapers’ accounts of how social media flooded with comments concerning the police officer’s appearances, which are mostly delivered in a mundane, joking, and jovial manner, for instance “oh my god… This guy is insanely handsome…. Can I have one?!” (reddit, Indian_angrycock) ⁸ but also in more overtly sexual reactions, e.g. “Fuck the police, if you know what I mean” (Imgur, moolissaa). ⁹ However, the sites also include a range of other responses, which brings to the fore the conflictual implications of this image and the refugee exodus. Debates quickly shift focus from the situation in Denmark to the ones in Hungary, the United States, and other countries and do not come across as coherent or stringent but instead as eclectic, impulsive, and motivated by spur-of-the-moment reactions and emotions.

Comments such as this one, bringing up the perceived threat of refugees as terrorists, are not uncommon, which feed into the negotiations of identity spurred by instant news icons: “According to /r/worldnews that girl is an entitled criminal on par with rapists and murderers, and is probably affiliated with ISIS” (reddit, ‘QuarterOztoFreedom’). ¹⁰ Moreover, users reflect upon the different statuses of refugees and migrants and whether people fleeing Syria and neighboring countries are genuine refugees fleeing war and other imminent threats or have assumed this role out of convenience and under false pretenses:

Syrian ‘refugees’ who were going on hunger strike-type thing because they wanted to leave Hungary to get further to Germany, because Hungary is too poor or too dangerous or something (reddit, ‘mongo_lloyd’). ¹¹

Some see this series of images as a contrast to the Danish government’s policy on refugees. In the following quote, it is interesting to note that on par with the newspapers’ coverage, the Danish police officer is not regarded as a public authority and representative of a system but rather as a person acting as a model of civic engagement:

Denmark govermet [sic!] is super racist and are trying to force/keep out as many fugatives [sic!] they can. Good to see not all dk people are the same:) (Imgur, ‘WeBuiltThisSchmidtyOnTootseRolls’).

Others, meanwhile, turn to media meta-reflexivity. But they do so with more of a critical edge than does the newspapers’ metacoverage. The users are of the opinion that the photo “seems like a convenient photo-op” (Imgur, ‘Silverlight’) or downright “Aww adorable propaganda” (Imgur, ‘Cubiol’), implying that the images serve the interests of the police/government by embellishing the Danish approach to refugees.

This brief analysis of comments posted on Imgur and reddit points to how the journalists sourcing these sites in their coverage of the instant news icon seem to have been highly selective in choosing comments supporting the interpretation that the “world’s” women were infatuated with the Danish police officer. In contrast, the sites host a wide range of comments, which touch more explicitly than does the Danish news coverage on the political issues raised by the refugee situation and give vent to anger, indignation, fear, and other emotions far beyond the proclaimed unity of the positive reception recounted by the newspapers. Most of the comments seem to arise from an affective response to the images, which becomes a catalyst for expressing what appear to be preconceived opinions and emotional inclinations – as well as more-or-less coarse jokes. They hardly confirm the prevalent interpretation by the news (meta)coverage that the images “speak for themselves”.

Conclusion

The relationship between image abundance and iconic images in the current media landscape raises a number of questions: Which images attract notice and are remembered? How do relationships play out between news media and social media as well as between local and global media? Who are the individual actors and media institutions involved in mobilizing these images, why, and how? What publics form around iconic images? This article has suggested the concept of “instant news icons” to grasp the transformation that iconic images are undergoing in the digital age.

The various analytical approaches to the instant news icon of the refugee girl and the police officer point to some tendencies in this transformation: In today’s convergent and connective media landscape, icons arise faster and fade faster via the impromptu publics forming on social media, news media, and the interplay between the two. A particular interesting point in regard to what is termed “impromptu publics” in this article is that the public generating in response to the imagery of the Iranian refugee girl playing with a police officer was tied together through extensive practices of cross references between the news media and social media. Moreover, it included a meta-reflexive layer in both of these spheres. In offering deliberations on the larger communicative circuit in which the images circulated, the news media not least referred to the reception on social media, while social media users reflected on the way in which this image was framed in the news media. The main story in Denmark was that the images, via social media, had spread far beyond the national context. This metacoverage emphasized that the images “spoke for themselves” in their universal message of humanitarianism and the police officer’s romantic or erotic appeal to women. They cited social network sites to this effect, however, the actual comments on reddit and Imgur contradicted this interpretation by foregrounding a number of conflictual aspects of the case, indicating that the images did not, in fact, speak for themselves.

What was observable it this case was instead a “referential slippage”, to use a pertinent expression from Hariman and Lucaites (2007). When circulated across media and regions, a shift occurs from the photographs’ referential meaning to their symbolic meaning, i.e. from the original intention and historical circumstances to projected values, emotions, and opinions. Even if this instant news icon fostered a sense of cultural and political unity according to the newspapers, it hardly conveyed a fixed message on social media. They rather added contestation to the consensual approach of the newspapers.

This article has argued for the continued use of “icon” despite obvious limitations. One is that this term appears to be worn on account of the broad and somewhat uncritical application in various contexts. Another is that definitions of icons tend to be slippery or imprecise. The choice to stick with this concept is, as mentioned above, motivated by how “icon” is used in popular discourses and scholarship as well as how it grants access to historical comparisons. Another advantage of using this concept is that it is tied up with questions of power and enables research into the dynamic relationship between influential images, media, and politics in how prevalent conflicts and challenges in society are represented, discussed – and in which public realms.