Migration in the Mediterranean : the nexus with media

Abstract

On September 2, 2015, an image of a three-year old Syrian boy washed up on the beach in Turkey, went viral, penetrating every Facebook feed, tweeted thousands of times, and finding its way on the front pages of tens of newspapers in a few hours. Aylan Kurdi instantly became a household name but more than that, the image became iconic in that in his forlorn death, Aylan became the representative of the larger human tragedy that the refugee crisis had become and which up till then, had not elicited the response one would expect from the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War. The image of the Syrian toddler was seen on twenty million screens in twelve hours, with initial postings by a handful of journalists going viral with 53,000 uploads per hour - nothing less than a social media storm (Ferguson, 2016).