Características del modelo de seguridad y soberanía alimentarias de 1959-

Media communication is a kind of social activity which involves, but is not limited to, the production, transmission and reception of symbolic forms of people’s experiences; it also involves the implementation of resources of various kinds (Thompson, 1995: 18). In today’s media-saturated world, the majority of us encounter suffering of others in a secondary way, through different mediums, rather than directly. This is especially true in a globalised world when media project images of disasters across the globe immediately after they happen. One investigation into media reception has shown that the process of media products reception is much more active and creative than the passive recipient myth suggests(Hanna et al., 2011). Therefore, we cannot treat recipients of media products as ‘passive onlookers whose senses have been permanently dulled by the continuous reception of similar messages’; and we cannot view the process of reception as an ‘unproblematic, uncritical process through which products are absorbed by individuals’(Thompson, 1995: 25).

The late-modern world, also termed ‘high modernity’ by Anthony Giddens, that we are now living in has changed profoundly in contrast to preceding phases in human

history. Unlike pre-modern eras when life went on at a comparatively slow rhythm due to the fact that information failed to be instantly transmitted, life is mobile, innovative, and of a quicker rhythm. For instance, the influence of distant happenings on proximate events becomes more common under the influence of different kinds of media. Among which, ‘the increasingly intertwined development of mass printed media and electronic communication’ (Giddens, 1991: 25) is of great importance since the origin of high modernity. Mediated experience, in this sense, played a vital role in individuals’ understanding about the outside world, and caused a so-called ‘intrusion of distant events into everyday consciousness’ (ibid: 27, italics in original).

By conducting semiotic analysis on the verbal texts of distant suffering on western television news, such as BBC World Television, Danish National Television and so on, Lilie Chouliaraki identified three different modes of news reporting – adventure news, emergency news and ecstatic news. According to her, different news reporting requires different moral involvement from the audience. For example, the key feature of adventure news is that ‘its stories of suffering claim objectivity at the expense of emotionality’ (Chouliaraki, 2006: 106), therefore, this kind of reporting claims no emotional involvement; while emergency news entails a ‘demand for immediate action on distant misfortune’ (ibid: 118); and ecstatic news establishes a relationship of identification between the audience and the sufferer through shared ‘positive' emotion.

Paying particular attention to participants’ emotional engagement with faraway disasters and their sufferers, Maria Kyriakidou (2011) researched Greek television

audiences. From this she classified four different types of witnessing with regard to audiences’ witnessing positions: affective witnessing; ecstatic witnessing, politicized witnessing, and detached witnessing.

There remain no stable definitions of affect which can mean a lot of different things (Thrift, 2004: 59). In the context of witnessing distant suffering, audio-visual information from different media normally pay attention to the body or emotion of the sufferer(Zembylas, 2006). In other words, importance is placed on the stimuli to instigate audience bodily response. This way of viewing affect is pertinent to my study because I am researching witnessing responses to events like the Changchun- stole infant incident which involves different levels of affect. Therefore, affect in the context of this thesis is regarded as ‘a process in which one body acts upon another, and a product in the sense of a body’s capacity to affect and be affected’ (ibid: 309, italics in original). In this sense, generally speaking, affect is mainly unconscious, unpredictable, and includes unstructured subjective responses towards different stimuli. Brian Massumi distinguishes between affect and emotion by stating that they ‘follow different logics’ which ‘pertains to different orders’: in this distinction affect is irreducibly bodily while emotion is a subjective content (Massumi, 1996 cited in Zembylas, 2006: 309-310). However, affect and emotion are two inseparable concepts: affect attains the level of emotion once it receives conscious attention/reflection from an individual. These terms are different, but are intrinsically intertwined.

Firstly, affective witnessing requires emotional involvement from the audience. Involvement which incorporates a ‘spontaneous or natural feeling of empathy and

compassion’ (Kyriakidou, 2011: 154) as a result of seeing images of personalised stories of suffering. Therefore, in Luc Boltanski’s words, affective witnessing demands not only an ‘external report’ which describes unfortunates’ suffering, but also includes an ‘internal report’ (Boltanski, 1999: 86) which depicts an audiences’ subjective understanding of the suffering of the others from a distance. Furthermore, in affective witnessing, there is ‘an apparent collapse of distance between the spectators and the distant others on the basis of the perceived sameness in the face of the human pain’ (Kyriakidou, 2011: 157). As a result of the disappearance of distance, viewers are willing to engage with, and to understand the far-away others; which means that viewers normally have a true feeling of remorse towards others’ predicaments, and tend to show their hospitality to the sufferers. Last, in affective witnessing viewers are ‘in a relation of collusion with the media representations of the suffering in accepting the media as a sufficient way to fully engage with it’ (ibid : 162). Generally speaking, a paradox exists in the viewers’ relationship with the media: on the one hand, television viewers complain that media representations of suffering are affecting their judgements, but at the same time it is through such representations that audiences get the chance to know about the outside world.

Ecstatic witnessing is the second type according to Kyriakidou’s typology of media witnessing. It can be regarded as an extreme case, of affective witnessing, but it has its own characteristics as well. Ecstatic witnessing requires emotional involvement from the audience, to a more intensified degree compared with affective witnessing because of devastating disasters being witnessed by the

audience. Besides that, the urgency of witnessed suffering presents audiences with a sense of instantaneous proximity as if it is happening in front of their eyes. What is more, these devastating incidents feature or connect with death. The September 11 attacks were an example of the ecstatic witnessing among television audiences in Kyriakidou’s study. Consequently, the commonality of the experience of human pain is coupled with the fear of death, and annihilating time and space differences between the viewer and the sufferer. Furthermore, any other distinctions between people, such as nationality, cultural identity and social status, becomes unimportant. The commonality shared as physical human beings, and horror felt in the face of death, whether experiencing or viewing second hand, link the audience and the sufferer together. As a result of that, ecstatic witnessing tend to show ‘unconditional hospitality towards the people [who are] suffering’ and demands ‘unquestioning acceptance of the media coverage’ (ibid : 166). In this extreme case, the difference between ‘us’ and ‘other’ vanishes.

The third type is politicised witnessing. There is no space for individual agency in politicised witnessing, because viewers’ emotional involvement shifts from specific victims to the event as a whole. Furthermore, their involvement connects with ‘the search for the causes and the attribution of blame and political responsibility for the events witnessed’ (ibid : 176). Besides that, during the discussion and debates following the incident distinctions between the viewer(s) and the sufferer(s) becomes clear, and the audience show conditional hospitality towards sufferers at a distance. The paradox among audiences’ attitudes towards the media exist in the case of politicised witnessing as well: audiences showed their scepticism towards

mediated representations, and critically engaged with the media. For example, the Hurricane Katrina was one of the best instances of politicised witnessing among Greek television audiences.

The former three types of witnessing construct viewers as moral agents who can potentially bear emotional responses towards the suffering others. I say potentially because the final type of witnessing – detached witnessing – positions the viewer as a ‘disengaged spectator of the suffering’ (ibid : 188) in terms of the suffering of others. People avoid or cannot feel affective expressions in this kind of witnessing. Furthermore, the experience of witnessing a suffering is composed of a series of events without any involvement of personal emotions from the viewer. Lastly, the viewer uses ‘spatial deixis’ to rationalise the distance between them and the faraway suffering others. Detached witnessing is mainly found among young participants in Kyriakidou’s study.