Mediated Witnessing Under Fire: Digital War Narratives, Precarity, and the Fragmentation of Social Life in Iran

This article explores how civilians in Iran experience, narrate, and make sense of the 2026- armed conflict involving Iran, the United States, and Israel through digitally mediated storytelling and reflections on social suffering. It approaches platforms such as Instagram not merely as channels of communication but as spaces of mediated witnessing and vernacular knowledge production, where individuals document and interpret violence under conditions of censorship, prolonged internet shutdowns, infrastructural breakdown, and significant political risk. The analysis draws on first-person testimonies, affective expressions, and narrative fragments circulating online, alongside open-ended responses from participants in Iran and the diaspora. These materials are examined through a qualitative, multi-method approach that combines narrative inquiry with reflexive thematic analysis.
The findings suggest that war is not experienced as a discreet or bounded event; rather, it unfolds as an ongoing psychosocial condition embedded in everyday life. Participants’ narratives show how violence becomes embodied, normalized, and spatially diffuse, reshaping temporal experience, domestic environments, and bodily states marked by fear, fatigue, and illness. At the same time, shared exposure to violence does not necessarily generate collective cohesion. Instead, it often produces fragmentation, erodes interpersonal trust, and intensifies moral polarization, complicating notions of belonging. While moments of care and mutual support do emerge, these forms of solidarity remain fragile, situational, and often ambivalent.

Mediated witnessing; Digital war narratives; Social fragmentation; Precarity

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