The success with which the so-called Islamic State (IS) organisation managed to conquer the global imagination with a gory yet savvy online propaganda campaign remains noteworthy, even with the movement currently on the brink of defeat. The unprecedented amount of people who travelled to Iraq and Syria from all over the world to join the organisation, the string of violent attacks carried out in Europe by IS sympathisers or militants returning from the Syrian–Iraqi battlefield, and the increasing concern about online propaganda among both the public and politicians encourage reflection on the Janus-faced nature of digital and social media as both an intimate space and part of the war machine. Whereas existing research on online propaganda has focused predominantly on digital and social media as tools of radicalisation or as resources for disseminating information that challenges state sovereignty, this chapter analyses such media platforms as new spaces for the promotion and normalisation of war and violence, where the aesthetic affordances of digital and audiovisual technologies create new possibilities for militarisation. Specifically, the embodied and aesthetic sensibilities of spectators that are addressed by IS's propaganda, but also the embodied dynamics of how spectators might respond to them, are distinctive features of how war is experienced on and through digital media, revealing possibilities for promoting military action for insurgent groups like IS who do not have the communicative capacities that state militaries do.

In examining digital and social media as new spaces of militarisation, the chapter engages with an already extensive field of literature in critical military studies (CMS) that examines the aesthetic and sensuous dimensions of militarisation. Such an approach entails a shift in analytical focus from the content of texts, images or videos to the wide range of senses and practices involved in providing meaning to these forms of representation. Rather than analysing the cultural impact of texts, images or videos from the top down, this chapter thus emphasises the multiple and situated practices involved in making sense of media. It begins from an ‘embodied reading’ of Islamic State's online propaganda video ‘Flames of War’ in which I employ my own ethnographic imagination to uncover the affective sensibilities involved in everyday experiences of war on and through digital and social media.