Características del modelo de seguridad y soberanía alimentarias de 1975-

Kyriakidou (2011: 88) defines media remembering as ‘the discursive reconstruction of viewers’ memories of the events witnessed through the media’. Her emphasis on ‘discursive’ suggests that the practice of remembering is not only a reproduction of suffering witnessed through the media, but more importantly a reconstruction of media reports which have the effect of ‘turning memories of distant suffering into stories through discourse’. What Kyriakidou is interested in is not what suffering news is remembered by people, but rather how this news is put together. Her conceptualization of remembering originates from work on collective memory and discursive psychology.

For instance, Maurice Halbwachs was the first sociologist who pointed out that our conceptions of the past are not preserved, but reconstructed on the basis of the present. Although admittedly, it is the individual who remembers and has memory Halbwachs insists that individual memory ‘is not completely sealed off and isolated. A man must often appeal to other’s remembrances to evoke his own past… Moreover, the individual memory could not function without words and ideas, instruments the individual has not himself invented but appropriated from his milieu’ (Halbwachs, 1980: 51). He also notes that individual memory is ‘a part or an aspect of a group memory’ (Halbwachs, 1992: 53). This social context is understandable when considering that individual and collective, personal and societal are by no means separable, on the contrary, they are interdependent (Middleton, 1997: 72). In the eyes of Irwin-Zarecka (1994: 4), ‘as a set of ideas, images, feelings about the past, [collective memory] is best located not in the minds of individuals, but in the resources they share’.

The concept of collective memory by Maurice Halbwachs not only highlights ‘the mutually dependent relationship between individuals and society’, but also maintains that ‘it is through this interactive relationship that people come to construct their memories as social members’ (Kyriakidou, 2011: 88). According to Halbwachs (1992: 38), ‘our individual thought places itself in [social] frameworks and participates in [collective] memory that is capable of the act of recollection’. He also maintains that ‘[c]ollective frameworks are […] the instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord […] with

the predominant thoughts of the society’ (ibid: 40). In essence, collective memory is a reconstruction of the past by taking the present into consideration.

The work of discursive psychology also focuses attention on the socially constructed nature of memory. This field regards remembering as a process which combines ‘present, past and future in a single task through which we construct a discourse that allows us to objectivize our experience’ (Achugar, 2008: 7). Middleton and Edwards (1990: 11) demonstrate in their book that ‘remembering together [is] an enterprise achieved in acts of communication’ and that ‘remembering is achieved and represented in people’s talk with each other’. These ways of communicating are both constructive and action-oriented at the same time: they are constructive because ‘they offer a particular version of things’; they are action-oriented due to the fact that any version of events are not just interpretations from memory, but rather also involve the intention to do something, such as complaining, praising, justifying and countering (Edwards and Stokoe, 2004: 500). Consequently, media remembering is not only a practice of recollection, but makes judgements on events that people have remembered. In this view, memory becomes ‘not only the simple act of recall but social, cultural, and political action at its broadest level’ (Zelizer, 1998: 3). In their articulations of memories about distant suffering, people not only reconstruct events but ‘position themselves in relation to the social world and others’ (Kyriakidou, 2011: 90).

Collective memory ‘allow[s] for the fabrication, rearrangement, elaboration, and omission of details about the past’ (Zelizer, 1998: 3). Collective memory, on the one hand, has a close connection with individuals’ sense of collective identity, while on

the other hand, entails moral imperatives which form the basis of the normative order (Irwin-Zarecka, 1994: 9).

Summary

The present chapter reviews the main literature of this study. As shown in Chapter 1, this thesis is about the discursive construction of social media users’ moral agency towards distant suffering, and sufferers who appear on social media during. In other words, it is about the mediation of distant suffering among social media users within China. Section 3.1 is an introduction of Roger Silverstone’s concept of ‘mediapolis’ which shows that the characteristic of modern life are full of the mediated appearances of far-away others, and predicts moral responsibility from the audience. On top of that, this section also talks about mediation as a theoretical framework of this thesis, and briefly introduces relevant research traditions in media studies.

Section 3.2 presents the definition of suffering and distant others in this thesis. Suffering could happen in different aspects of people’s everyday lives, and usually causes damage to individuals. Distant others in this thesis refers to those who only appear to us through the media. In this highly mediated world, in the social media era, the observation of other’s suffering bears more significance for audiences or users than at any other time in history. Furthermore, I review literature on the mediation of suffering in the social media era. The roles that media play during the mediation of suffering are numerous, at the same time there is a need to do more research on audience engagement with mediated suffering.

Section 3.3 is about the concept of ‘agency’, and introduces three tensions in the formation of moral agency: the engagement of the viewers with the scene of suffering in media reports, the viewer’s complicity with and responsibility towards the media, and the viewer’s hospitality and apathy with regards to the suffering others.

Section 3.4 and 3.5 introduce media witnessing and media remembering – two media practices which are central in the expression of the users’ moral agency. Media witnessing shows the way social media users position themselves as observers of distant others’ suffering. Media remembering denotes social media users’ reconstruction of memories of the events witnessed through the media. In articulating how they see and remember distant suffering, the users also articulate their sense of agency. Media witnessing and media remembering enable the analysis of how social media users embed distant suffering in their everyday lives, and how they articulate their sense of possible moral agency.

CHAPTER 4 METHODOLOGY