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Gaza’s long association with resistance and humanitarian need has generated a complex and ever shifting range of visual material, comprising not just news reports and documentaries, but also essay, experimental, and fiction films, militant videos, and solidarity images. Contributors to Gaza on Screen, who include scholars and Gazan filmmakers, explore the practice, production, and impact of film and videos from and about the Gaza Strip. Conceptualizing screens—both large and small—as tools for mediation that are laden with power, the volume explores Gazan film and video in relation to humanitarianism and human rights, care, community, environment, mobility and confinement, and decolonization. The volume includes visual material ranging from solidarity broadcasts on Lebanese television, mid-twentieth-century British Pathé newsreels, and fiction films to breaking news, visuals of contemporary militant resistance, documentaries, and found footage films, arguing for a visual ecosystem in which differing types of film and video affect and inform each other. Throughout, Gaza on Screen demonstrates that screens shape and sustain relationships between Gaza and the world, and help to sustain the possibility of a different future.

Contributors. Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, Shahd Abusalama, Samirah Alkassim, Basma Alsharif, Hadeel Assali, Azza El-Hassan, Hatim El-Hibri, Mohamed Jabaly, Ahmed Mansour, Arab Nasser, Tarzan Nasser, Kamran Rastegar, Viviane Saglier, Abdelsalam Shehada, Yaron Shemer, Rebecca L. Stein, Helga Tawil-Souri, Shaira Vadasaria, Nadia Yaqub

An illuminating investigation of the complex work of social media content creators—their lives, conflicts, and controversies. 

In this eye-opening book, digital studies scholar Angèle Christin demystifies the content creator economy, explaining its long history and the pitfalls of its professionalization. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork with digital creators as varied as vegan YouTubers, dads of Instagram, and self-described drama commentators, Christin shows how individuals enter social media creation, how they make money, and how their online environments shape their content. 

Aspiring creators often dream of a better life in social media careers. Yet these dreams soon turn into exhaustion as influencers try to meet the contradictory demands of platforms, brands, and audiences. Over time, Christin shows, creators cluster into three types: hucksters, who work on behalf of brands; entertainers, who chase virality and platform payments; and gurus, who monetize the loyalty of their fans. Platform dynamics push entertainers and gurus to create extreme and incendiary content to maintain audience engagement, while brands and marketers nudge hucksters toward repetitive, staid commercial performances. Concerns about algorithmic manipulation and conflicts between creators further lead to reputation-damaging, harassment-laden scandals. Christin reveals how platform labor repeatedly—and structurally—fosters precarity and inequality, destructive drama, and inflammatory content online.