Rhetorics of iconics: New media informatics, terrorism, and cybersemiotics

Through several key case studies of terrorism in its relationship to the media, this dissertation examines the essence of an icon today in a hyperworld of digital icons and their iconic events. As we experience these events exponentially, systemically in---and through---new media and news media, we are forced to examine links and connections between the traditional understanding and historical roots of the icon, iconography, and iconology, and new digital iconics acting with agency in cybersemiotics, where the static expectation of an image today is no longer defensible.Because of exponential audience receptivity---through ubiquitous global media ownership and promulgation---the image or icon becomes an iconic: a relatively omnipotent, highly-revered structural phenomenon of exponential potential. In this dissertation I define an iconic as an instantiation, a media moment in the global consciousness that rises to new stature due to its placement in that consciousness through a gestalt of its visual rhetorics in sync with tenets of digitality. I illustrate how the effects of this metamorphosis are far-reaching and powerful, and so far they have been best realized in mediated messagings associated with rhetorics of terrorism, especially as terrorism archives in cyberspace through the permanence of iconics as a viral phenomenon.This dissertation also suggests that as an extension of the symbiotic relationship between terrorism and the media, iconics contribute to the proposition that the cyber network is borderline autopoietic, and they act with agency within the virtual. Their permanent presence can be understood to constitute an armory of available weaponry that the system or anyone connected to it can wield at will, should there be access and privilege. Consequently, as cyberspace becomes the next battleground for human values and objectives, the cyber network with its steady iconic creation machinations, omniscience, and ubiquity render new ethical and technological challenges.