When is a conflict a crisis? On the aesthetics of the Syrian civil war in a social media context

<jats:p> This article examines mobile phone videos that have been disseminated via YouTube since the beginning of the Syrian civil war to illustrate how media aesthetics and public discourse interact in the perception and interpretation of conflicts as crises. The Syrian civil war has shown that scenes of immediate protest and military action recorded on mobile phones become instruments of war and conflict as they bear a new aesthetics that influences the perception and interpretation of the situation in Syria. The article introduces a research perspective that is informed by discourse analysis and media aesthetics and can be used for the study of the perception and interpretation of war and conflict in relation to social media in general and mobile phone videos in particular. By providing new insights from this perspective for the study of war and conflict reporting, it furthers the debate on the perceptive and interpretive impact of images. </jats:p>