Modern Spectatorship of War

In the age of instant digital communication, war is no longer distant. It unfolds in real time, streamed, shared, performed, and consumed. Violent images spread worldwide at the speed of light, often detached from their original context. The nature of the internet often reduces these images to disembodied simulacra, stripped of the nuances and complexity that once gave them meaning. So, when watching a news tragedy today, it can be to be viewed as part of a long historical tradition of looking at pain for self-improvement and public good virtue. 

Susan Sontag famously argued that even when photographs make war ‘real’, the moral effect is lost in transmission in the image-saturated world (Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003). Nowadays, we don't just observe war but actively participate by reposting and commenting. The viewer becomes involved in the spectacle, helping to spread images of suffering and destruction, unknowingly turning conflict into easily consumed content. We like to believe that exposure of atrocities will restrain oppressors. But does it?

The battlefield has migrated into our daily phone feeds, creating a paradox: we are closer to war than ever, yet we are increasingly desensitised to its constant presence. Images are not neutral: they are mobilised to rally support, spread fear, and discredit opponents. Each photograph can serve as proof or propaganda; each video can either save lives or end them. 

Jean Baudrillard’s provocation that the Gulf War “did not take place”(1) reminds us that mediation can eclipse events themselves. Today, in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, the same logic holds – war is fought with bombs and drones, but also with hashtags and viral clips. The spectacle of war demands a new ethics of seeing. 

To photograph is to appropriate, Sontag warned. Ethical witnessing must resist that appropriation: portraying subjects with dignity, acknowledging one’s complicity, insisting that the human cost remains visible. Watching is no longer passive. It is political, shaping how events are understood and remembered. Yet what happens to empathy in this system? Does endless exposure sharpen understanding, or dull it? At what point does witnessing become voyeurism — suffering transformed into tragic entertainment?

Since Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), the mediatisation of war has evolved from a system managed by professional journalists and editors to one dominated by decentralised, real-time, and often chaotic flows of imagery. In her era, what audiences saw from conflict zones was filtered through a narrow gate of war correspondents and newsrooms, where images were curated, verified, and woven into coherent narratives. Today, especially in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, war is mediated through a continuous flow of smartphone videos, Telegram updates, TikTok clips, drone footage, and livestreams produced not only by journalists but also by soldiers, civilians, and propagandists. Bombings in Mariupol or strikes on Kyiv can appear online within seconds, often before traditional media verifies them. Additionally, algorithms tend to amplify the most emotionally charged material, meaning that visceral, decontextualised clips usually garner more visibility than measured reporting. 

This shift has made audiences both more direct witnesses to war and more susceptible to manipulated or staged content, eroding the reflective distance Sontag regarded as essential for understanding the pain of others. During the 1991Gulf War, audiences experienced a highly choreographed spectacle: a limited number of satellite-fed broadcasts, night-vision footage of “surgical strikes,” and official briefings that narrowly controlled the narrative. By 2003, the Iraq War, introduced a 24-hour news cycle, embedded journalism, and blogs, yet military control remained strong.  

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, labelled as the first ‘TikTok war’(2), has completely shattered control: soldiers, civilians, and even drones stream unfiltered footage live, bypassing traditional news outlets entirely. TikTok clips, Telegram channels, and viral tweets coexist with investigative journalism, creating a contested, chaotic media battlefield where truth, propaganda, and performance merge. The spectacle of war has shifted from being broadcast to being crowdsourced. Seeing itself has become inseparable from the machinery of war.

This collapse of boundaries is clearest in the rise of operational images: visuals produced not to tell a story or evoke empathy but to serve military or political functions. From aerial reconnaissance in the world wars to satellite photos, such images were long confined to command structures and press briefings. Today, however, uncensored drone strike videos, geolocated battlefield maps, and satellite-confirmed destruction circulate simultaneously among generals and global audiences.

The Ukrainian “Army of Drones Bonus” programme crystallises this shift. Verified drone strikes earn points, redeemable for new equipment on an online defence marketplace. Military logistics become a reward system, where acts of destruction are quantified like achievements in a game. This logic mirrors social media metrics: visibility, points, and rewards displace ethical or strategic reflection. By turning violence into performance, operational imagery blurs war and play, destabilising how combatants and spectators alike perceive responsibility.

The Minotaur gives this process a face. A hybrid creature, part man and part beast, it was born of transgression and hidden deep within the labyrinth. Hidden in the labyrinth, sustained by ritual offerings, it embodies the monstrous logic of violence that societies generate from within. The Minotaur multiplies in modern war, becoming drone, data, meme, missile, making it difficult to recognise the monster not just in others but in ourselves, our technologies, our institutions. It hides behind euphemisms such as “Special Military Operation,” “peacekeeping mission,” or “pre-emptive strike.”  We send lives into the maze – soldiers, civilians, children – in the belief that order depends on sacrifice. The corridors shift but never end; what was once mythic architecture now takes the form of news alerts, hashtags, and endless video scrolls. To enter the labyrinth is to risk losing orientation, to become part of the spectacle one is trying to understand.

However, beneath this surface, war remains fundamentally mythic, influenced by ancient stories and archetypes that invoke trust, loyalty, and sacrifice, creating images of enemies and heroes. All current conflicts are haunted by these persistent myths, which are evident in propaganda, media stories, and the spectacle of digital warfare. Myth functions here not as fantasy, but as a framework of meaning. War needs myth to sustain itself: it requires the story of the righteous nation, the demonised enemy, and the promised victory. These are not just political constructions; they are archetypes rooted in collective memory.

The mythic lens lends emotional and existential significance to the brutality of reality. As Susan Sontag warned, “all wars are now wars of images”, and these images frequently tap into a mythological unconscious, whether we are conscious of it or not. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this machinery is clearly at work. The Kremlin invokes the mythic language of “Mother Russia,” Slavic unity, and a holy struggle, reimagining history as prophecy. Meanwhile, Ukraine responds with its mythic figures, symbolising resilience, rebirth, and the underdog challenging the empire. Both sides are engaged in a symbolic war, as much as a physical one. In this sense, the battlefield extends into realms of memory, faith, and story. These narratives transmute raw death into sacrifice and spectacle. They protect us from the unbearable by placing suffering inside patterns we already recognise. And yet, by doing so, they perpetuate the cycle.

Historically, the Minotaur has remained an adaptable symbol, always hybrid, always dangerous: in Classical art as Theseus’ adversary, in the Renaissance moralised as a warning against uncontrolled desire, in Surrealism embraced as a figure of the subconscious. Across these reimaginings it endures as an archetype of primal instinct and the border between civilisation and savagery. It compels us to confront what exists at the intersection of humanity’s highest ideals and deepest instincts. Artists have long used the Minotaur to explore war’s psychological toll, as in Pablo Picasso’s Minotauromachy (1935), created on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, where the creature is shown wounded and anguished on the eve of civil conflict. Two years later, this mythic language reappears in Guernica, where the bull and the fragmented figures take on the force of archetypes rather than literal portraits of violence. In both works, myth becomes a way to translate trauma into image, to give symbolic shape to what otherwise exceeds comprehension.

Modern war, experienced by global spectators, unfolds in a new kind of labyrinth: vast, disorienting, made of contradiction, confusion, and simulated truths. We no longer enter with our bodies but with our eyes, through images, hashtags, livestreams, and alerts. In the twenty-first century, we no longer live within myth, but myth lives within us. Soldiers and civilians alike navigate the maze and make choices under the weight of forces beyond their control, much as mythic heroes face trials that reveal both their vulnerabilities and their capacities for resilient endurance. The Minotaur becomes a mirror of the human condition, translating the chaos and suffering of war into symbolic form.

(1) Jean Baudrillard originally published the provocative essay series titled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place in Libération (France) and The Guardian (UK) in early 1991
(2) The term “first TikTok war” gained prominence during the early stages of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Various media outlets and journalists contributed to its popularisation. For instance, in March 2022, The New Yorker published an article titled “Watching the World’s ‘First TikTok War’”, highlighting how Ukrainians were documenting the conflict on TikTok . Similarly The Atlantic referred to the invasion as “the first TikTok war” in an article discussing the role of social media in the conflict.