Graphic explores our growing global exposure to distressing imagery, offering science-based ways to maximize meaning and minimize harm from time spent online.
About Graphic
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In today’s information age, we can watch graphic events daily, like the livestream of a mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, or video of a Burmese soldier shooting a man in broad daylight. And it’s not just overt violence: We might stumble upon an apartment complex imploding, swallowing up 98 people in a matter of seconds; stampeding fires, tsunamis, and earthquakes, all images that can be as traumatic as any captured in a war zone. What was once a rare glimpse into the world’s horrors is now commonplace on our handheld screens. The video of George Floyd's murder is not the first viral image to capture the world’s attention and it won’t be the last. But the video may well be among the most catalytic of our times, given the pandemic, which dramatically increased peoples’ viewing time online. This video, in this time, marks a moment in the history of graphic content and raises the question of when, how—and even if—we should be watching what others post online.
In Graphic: Trauma and Meaning in Our Online Lives, we draw upon the experiences of those who work closely with user-generated content to help answer these questions and make sense of this moment. We talked with reporters at major news outlets and researchers who have looked closely at the effects of disturbing online content on human rights workers and journalists. We learned from people who have led teams at major social media platforms, as well as the content moderators tasked with watching thousands of hours of disturbing posts, ranging from terrorism to the sexual exploitation of children. We picked the brains of neuroscientists, professors, and psychologists—as well as teenagers and young adults who have grown up in the era of social media—to understand how graphic and distressing content affects all of us.
As academics, as journalists, and as human rights researchers and investigators, we wrote this book because we see the value of people engaging with difficult content in order to better understand our world; to challenge structural racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of discrimination; to combat state-sponsored violence; to illuminate hate speech and hate crimes; and ultimately, to make change. But we also recognize the need to learn from those who are shifting the paradigm—from the traditional and often macho approach of “hardened” journalists, war crimes investigators and human rights workers who spent decades claiming falsely, “this stuff doesn’t affect me,” to a more holistic approach that acknowledges that this content actually does affect us—to identify the ways that we can more safely take in these images and respond as individuals and communities without looking away.
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In Graphic, we provide practical tips and suggestions for how people can minimise the risk of psychological harm from viewing graphic and other upsetting material online.
We summarize the most recent research about the harms and benefits of social media engagement, distill key takeaways from the latest research, and make that research accessible to readers without specialised training .
Finally, we explore the history and impact of iconic imagery that has helped shaped activism, and bring that history up to the current day, with the goal of making the history of activist images accessible and understandable to everyone.
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You can visit the Human Rights Center website to access our latest research. You can also visit Promoting Restoration and Capacity Building for Human Rights Investigators to access free hands-on exercises for maximizing resilience to graphic material.
None of us are strangers to graphic content. Millions of people have the shared experience of watching a police officer press his knee into George Floyd’s neck as he died over an excruciating period of 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Today, almost anyone can upload and disseminate newsworthy content online, which has radically transformed our information ecosystem. Yet this often leaves us exposed to content produced without ethical or professional guidelines. In Graphic, Alexa Koenig and Andrea Lampros examine this dynamic and share best practices for safely navigating our digital world. Drawing on the latest social science research, original interviews, and their experiences running the world’s first university-based digital investigations lab, Koenig and Lampros provide practical tips for maximizing the benefits and minimizing the harms of being online. In the wake of the global pandemic, they ask: How are people processing graphic news as they spend more time online? What practices can newsrooms, social media companies, and social justice organizations put in place to protect their employees from vicarious trauma and other harms? Timely and urgent, Graphic helps us navigate the unprecedented psychological implications of the digital age.
Meet the Authors
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Alexa Koenig, PhD, JD, is Co-Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center (winner of the 2015 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions), an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, and a lecturer at Berkeley Journalism. Alexa co-founded the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab, which trains students and professionals to use social media and other online information to strengthen human rights research, reporting, and accountability. Alexa is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, a member of Physicians for Human Rights’s advisory board, a member of the advisory board for Human Rights First’s Innovation Lab, and a co-founder of the University of California Network on Human Rights and Digital Fact-Finding. She previously held appointments as co-chair of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor; as co-chair of the International Bar Association's Human Rights Law Committee; and as a member of the University of California’s Presidential Working Group on Artificial Intelligence. Alexa has been honored with several awards for her work, including the United Nations Association-SF’s Global Human Rights Award, the Mark Bingham Award for Excellence, and the Eleanor Swift Award for Public Service. She has also been honored with a writing residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, a writing residency at Mesa Refuge in Pt. Reyes, as a 2020 Woman Inspiring Change by Harvard Law School (2020), as one of “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics” by Women in AI Ethics (2022), and with diverse research grants. She directed development of the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations and has trained journalists, war crimes investigators and human rights advocates around the world on online investigation methods. Her research and commentary have appeared in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, US News and World Report, Slate, and elsewhere. Alexa has a BA from UCLA summa cum laude, a JD from the University of San Francisco magna cum laude, and an MA and a PhD from UC Berkeley in Jurisprudence and Social Policy with honors.
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Andrea Lampros , MJ '97, is the communications director at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She is formerly the communications director of the UC Berkeley School of Education and the 21st Century California School Leadership Academy. She also worked more than nine years at UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center, serving as the associate director, co-founder of the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab, and resiliency manager of the lab. At the Human Rights Center, Andrea worked with student teams to support journalists from leading publications, such as the Associated Press and Washington Post, to conduct open source investigations. She was a lecturer for a mini-course on open source investigations and part of the team that taught the first full course on open source investigative reporting at Berkeley Journalism in fall 2021. Also at Berkeley, she was a principal editor and chief proposal writer on the marketing and communications team at Berkeley’s University Relations, now University Development and Alumni Relations. She was the first development director at the Graduate School of Journalism. After graduating from Berkeley Journalism, Andrea spent more than a decade working as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, and freelance writer for Bay Area publications. She wrote a chapter about the labor movement in The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip (Oxford University Press) and co-wrote a chapter about the use of DNA in El Salvador’s search for disappeared children in Silent Witness: forensic DNA analysis in criminal investigations and humanitarian disasters (Oxford University Press). She was a senior producer on Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten, which aired on PBS in May 2021. With Alexa Koenig, she wrote Graphic: Trauma and Meaning in Our Online Lives (Cambridge University 2023).
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For event and press inquiries, or high resolution photo downloads, please contact Maggie Andresen:
mandresen@berkeley.edu
845.608.4997