Digital donations and Visual Culture: Haiti Earthquake Relief

What is it about?

This article looks at the phenomenon of digital donating (through SMS, smart phones, and computer "donation buttons"), as well as digital advocacy and action, which all consumed the attention of US internet-using publics in the first months following the January 2010 Haiti earthquake. I argue that the new practice of digital donating was part of what humanitarian organizations have termed a “new culture” in the field of disaster relief, enabled by advances in new communication technologies, especially visual technologies. Average internet publics, integrated into this “new culture,” I argue, were thereby integrated into wider “strategic complexes” (Duffield), that include humanitarian organizations, states, the private sector, the military, etc., who are now responsible for global stability and thus disaster relief. As such, average internet publics engaged in digital advocacy and digital donating ultimately, and of course unwittingly, performed the unpaid work of communicating messages that promoted the ideologies and imperatives of global power that was aimed, not at rebuilding, but containing disaster-struck regions, like Haiti.

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