This article examines the role of direct address in capturing revolutionary emotions in Lebanon's October 17 uprising, suggesting its profound implications on collective memory.
This article examines the role of the aesthetic convention of the direct address in the October 17 uprising in Lebanon. It shows how the proliferation of the direct address—often associated with the “right here right now” intimacies and urgencies of speaking to a camera circulated on digital platforms and live TV—came to define the feeling of a revolutionary moment unfolding. It explores the aesthetic formation and temporality of the direct address through an analysis of its appearance in the digital video output of the independent online media platform Megaphone News and personal testimonials on the MTV talk show Sar Al Waqt. It situates this comparison in the context of the emergence of “right-time” platform cultures and the liminal temporalities of revolutionary moments. The article shows how the direct address, which once gave aesthetic coherence to an event defined by a sense of collective historical possibility, also informs a sense of postrevolutionary defeat and the affective contradictions of remembering the October 17 uprising in the present.
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Hatim El-Hibri (2026) studied this question.
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