Perspectivas de proyectos de educación

The phenomenon that natural disasters, particularly those happening outside where the reporters originally come from, attract different amounts of attention has been noted for a long time. For example, by covering news reports on U.S. television from January 1972 to June 1985, Adam (1986) found that the amount of attention U.S. television news devoted to a natural disaster showed no relationship to the severity of the disaster (which usually used the death toll in a disaster as the index). On the contrary, geographical proximity seemed to play an important role in this broad pattern: Western Europe attracted the most attention indisputably, and then Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. Using the data collected, a shocking equation of relative coverage was found: ‘the death of 1 Italian would equal those of 3 Romanians, 9 Latin Americans, 11 Middle Easterners, and 12 Asians’ (ibid: 117). Furthermore, cultural proximity, political economy and social interest also played a role, which could be accounted for by a country’s popularity with U.S. tourists. In a nutshell, the globe is comprised of areas of priority, and thus more attention is allocated to human death that happens in some parts of the world compared with others.

It is not surprising for people to discover that there are 'hierarchies of place and human life' during the reporting of suffering across the globe, and consequently disaster reporting invites various kinds of audience engagement with the sufferers,

and allows for different relations between audiences and sufferers. In other words, in the tradition of the western media, when emergencies happened in Western countries or Western people got hurt, they normally drew great attention from the media. As a result of the ethnocentric characteristic of the media, the articulation of the viewer’s moral agency turns into a complex process which involves different kinds of audience engagement, and different relations between the audience and the sufferer. Kyriakidou (2011: 54) recognises three tensions concerning the formation of the audiences’ moral agency vis-à-vis their relationshps with the distant others: the viewers’ engagement with the scene of suffering; their attitudes towards the media; andtheir relationship with the distant sufferers. To put it in more concrete terms: ‘(1) the tension between emotional involvement and rationalised detachment from the scene of suffering, (2) the tension between hospitality and apathy towards the distant others, and (3) the tension between audience responsibility and complicity with the media’ (ibid: 54).

3.3.2.1 Viewer engagement with scenes of suffering

Viewer’s engagement with scenes of suffering refers to an individual’s emotions and judgements towards mediated suffering. Emotional involvement relies on identification with the suffering of another, and that the audience exerts their imagination based on sources of suffering supplied by different media. In Boltanski’s words, instead of observing suffering from the outside, the audience needs to ‘return into himself, go inwards, and allow himself to hear what his heart tells him’ (Boltanski, 1999: 81, italics in orginal). In other words, emotional involvement requires an ‘internal report [which] seeks to depict what takes place in

the heart of the reporter, the states through which the heart passes’, rather than an ‘external report’ which describes suffering like a pebble skimming over a body of water (ibid : 86, italics in orginal). By and large, emotional involvement is the active and affective immersion of the audience experiencing the suffering of others through the media, and it is about the audiences’ emotions and judgements on suffering confronted on the media.

In his book about distant suffering, Boltanski distinguishes three modes of audience emotional commitment while witnessing distant suffering: the mode of denunciation, the mode of sentiment, and the aesthetic mode. The denunciation mode involves indignant accusation and denunciation which directs audiences’ attention away from an unfortunate person’s suffering, but towards the persecutor (ibid: 57); the sentiment mode expresses sympathy and tender-heartedness towards the unfortunate which are inspired by a benefactors’ act of charity and the unfortunate’s gratitude towards this act of kindness (ibid: 77); and finally the aesthetic mode could be understood as the shock or horror of an audience while facing the unfortunate’s suffering in a transformed form of sublimation (ibid: 115). Besides the three forms of emotional responses mentioned above, Höijer (2004: 523) identifies another two forms (of ‘compassion’ in Höijer’s terminology): shame- filled and powerlessness-filled. Shame-filled compassion relates to an audiences’ ambivalence and the contradiction between witnessing another’s suffering from a more comfortable situation. Shame might lead to anger or denunciation towards oneself for not engaging with distant suffering; while powerless-filled compassion

depicts audiences’ impotence and powerlessness to alleviate the suffering of individuals perceived as victims.

Shame and powerless while confronting another’s suffering can lead to detachment from the scene in a rationalised way. Overexposure to scenes of suffering within comfort zones, such as one’s home might cause information overload, and lead to ‘selective oblivion’ or ‘normalization and routinization’ of suffering on the media. Combined with the inability to immediately act upon scenes of suffering, it is possible for people to feel numb, and, eventually, desensitized in response to suffering. In the end, audiences remove themselves from scenes of suffering, and this disengagement is conceptualised as ‘compassion fatigue’ (Moeller, 1999; Cohen, 2001; Seu, 2003). Or, to put it more bluntly, this is compassion avoidance more than compassion fatigue: where audiences actively look away from hopeless and incomprehensible situations (Cohen, 2001: 194). Compassion avoidance in essence is a kind of denial which refuses to face, trust and accept suffering from the media. Different people may respond as laid out in the emotional responses mentioned above, and yet various forms of emotional engagement and detachment may arise in the same person at the same time. 3.3.2.2 Complicity with and responsibility towards the media

A second source of tension concerns the mediation of the audiences’ moral agency, and relates to the degree of audience trust and judgements placed on the media as an adequate resource for the understanding of far-away others. Everyday life and the media are becoming more and more inseparable. A specific characteristic of

modernity is our increasing trust in abstract systems. In this way, ‘one can no longer conceive of the everyday without acknowledging the central role that increasingly the electronic media (but also books and the press) have in defining its way of seeing, being and acting’ (Silverstone, 2007: 110).

According to Silverstone (ibid: 129-130): any media attempt to claim a reality or a truth involves a complicity among producers, subjects and audiences. Complicity could be seen as a refusal to confess that the process that they participated in is inadequate. More specifically, producers are well aware of the limitations of reporting practices, and often choose not to reveal the limitations of given knowledge to their subjects and audiences, whether consciously or unconsciously. Subjects are often in vulnerable situations compared to producers, therefore, they do not have a choice apart from following the rules of the reporting industry. With regard to audiences, as participants in the mediapolis, they are complicit when they refuse to challenge the media’s representational claims, or remain silent and accept such reporting uncritically even when realizing its limitations.

Media images of the suffering others give an audience the illusion of seeing the crisis as fully as the sufferer. As a result of that, the audience tend to believe that all the information provided is necessary and sufficient for their judgements about the outside world. However, the audience may recognise that ‘[t]he mediated symbolic is not imposed upon us as a space of no escape’, on the other hand it is out of the audiences’ choices to choose on a daily basis. This choice involves agency, and agency ‘involves the possibility of challenge and refusal’ (ibid: 133). In other words, the audience might understand the media-saturated culture and take

responsibility for it consequently. However, it does not rule out the possibility that the audience might begin to doubt, challenge and finally change the media- saturated culture.

It not uncommon among audience that there is a lack of suspicion or scepticism towards various media reports in different platforms. However, instead of accepting whatever is transmitted by different media, the audience should be more critical and alert. Audiences could become suspicious about ‘the emotions, desires, and intentions which accompany representations of suffering and, more radically, about the very existence of the unfortunates whose misery is shown’ (Boltanski, 1999: 151). As a result of this media scepticism, some audiences might intentionally choose to avoid facing distant suffering. However, in this case, it is an audiences’ responsibility to become more sceptical about media reports. They should be willing and able to engage in media materials critically, to realise the inadequacy of mainstream mediated representations, and at the same time to grasp the particularities of the reported suffering.

Responsibility is normally an expression of power, however, in this case, audience responsibly is a kind of accountability without power. In mediapolis, accountability cannot be avoided, because after all, ‘our ultimate responsibility as citizens goes wider than the media’s representation of the world: it reaches to the world which the media represent’ (Silverstone, 2007: 135).

3.3.2.3 Hospitality and apathy

The third source of tension, during the construction of the audiences’ moral agency, moves between two extremes of unconditional hospitality and lack of concern. Specifically in the relationship between the audience and distant others in respect of their suffering.

Hospitality in this thesis is understood as ‘the ability and willingness of the viewer first, to welcome the presence of the other on the screen, and second, to understand their predicament’ (Kyriakidou, 2011: 58). Silverstone (2007: 136) argues that if justice is the first virtue of social institutions, then hospitality is the first virtue of the mediapolis. Jacques Derrida distinguishes between absolute or unconditional and conditional hospitality (Derrida, 2000: 25). According to him, true hospitality is not constrained by urban or national self-interest; does not involve or depend upon invitation. However, true hospitality is not without risk. It is the same in the symbolic spaces of the mediapolis where the abuse of hospitality is not uncommon. Therefore, it is reasonable to acknowledge that, except in complete self-representation, mediated representation always involves a constrained, limited and restricted form of hospitality (Silverstone, 2007: 140-141). Silverstone treats the capacity and expectation of welcoming strangers in one’s symbolic space, with or without anticipations of reciprocity, as a specific characteristic of being human. Hospitality is a primary ethic in a globalised world, and ‘[i]t goes to the heart of our relationship with others. Indeed it is constitutive of such relations’ (ibid: 139). In mediapolis which is full of reports of 'hierarchies of

place and human life', it is not reasonable to expect an even distribution of hospitality among victims of suffering from different cultural, political and social backgrounds. Therefore, the relationship between the audience and the sufferer during the mediation of distant suffering might range from unconditional hospitality, to conditional hospitality, and to complete indifference.