Mediated citizenship ? Global spectatorship and global suffering

1. Mediated citizenship? Global spectatorship and global suffering New Media, Communication and Peace in the Global Knowledge Society Monday 13 2006 Dr Gavan Titley National University of Ireland, Maynooth

2. A Global We? When people can hear on radio and watch on their TV screens events and tragedies occuring on the other side of the globe…then a global perspective becomes part of everyday reality…a globalised present inescapably extends responsibility beyond representatives of local and national governments to the individual…the perspective of the objective observer is no longer appropriate when ‘the other’ is absorbed into a global we Barbara Adams, ‘Re-vision: The centrality of time for an ecological social science perspective’ in Lash et al (ed.) (1996) Risk, Environment and Modernity

3. Possible shared experiences? On the whole we believe that our willingness to witness suffering is to our credit. It is not merely that our knowledge of their pain may be useful to those subjected to it: we like to believe that there is a virtue in frankly confronting a difficult subject…being a spectator may sometimes bring out the best in us – and echo a long, even ancient tradition of bearing witness – so that the task of the news is to catch our attention with accounts of events that will test our mettle…are these rituals and habits producing a common, even global way of experiencing the world? Jean Seaton, Carnage and the Media (2005: xx)

4. Proximity = new forms of distance? (The) television screen, while presenting us with information on these events, may simultaneously function as a filter or distancing mechanism, allowing us also to ‘screen out’ the more disturbing aspects of the events we feel compelled to ‘witness’ through these media Morley, David & Kevin Robbins, Spaces of Identity, 1995: 7

5. Living in the telecity: • The representation of ‘strangers’ involves a loss of embodied presence and thus moral integrity (‘a glass screen to which their lives are confined) • The telecity involves the replacement of the moral by the aesthetic (depth by surface) • Suffering is only morally compelling when the ‘other’ is present with integrity (morality of short arms) Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (1993)

6. Compassion fatigue? • Multi-dimensional phenomena • Consequence of ubiquity of instantaneous sources of information about the world • Coverage of events (with limited context?) and thresholds of coverage (spectacularisation) may lead to a feeling of being overwhelmed by information and powerlessness • Question of identification and distance? From Kinnick et al (1996) ‘Compassion fatigue: communication and burnout towards social problems’ Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly 73(3): 687-707

7. Television as a door of perception: A door through which the particular and individual viewer enters into a much broader space of moral responsibilities and solidarity, Or, A door out of the world into the private sphere of home and television consumption?

8. ‘Sometimes television is consequential. The question thus becomes: when and how’? (Keith Tester, ‘The Moral Consequentiality of Television’, 1999:471) Giving? Eoin Devereaux on Telethon in Ireland… • Giving as distance? • Giving as a reflection on individual and collective self? • Depoliticised relationship of ‘caring and sharing’? • Giving as the severance of responsibility?

9. Empirical research on audiences and compassion: Birgitta Hoijer, “The Discourse of Global Compassion: The Audience and Media Reporting of Human Suffering” (2004) • Compassion “has to do with perceiving the suffering and needs of distant others through media images and reports. Global compassion is then a moral sensibility or concern for remote strangers from different continents, cultures and societies” • Unavoidable awareness is a challenge to ‘include strangers in their moral conscience’

10. Work in Norway and Sweden on coverage of the Kosovo war: • Compassion-worthiness? “[…] cognitions of victims… vary. As a cultural-cognitive construction, the discourse of global compassion designates some victims as ‘better’ victims than others” (2004: 516). • Situational complexity: “A condition for being moved is that we as audience can regard the victim as helpless and innocent” (2004: 521). • Duration and ‘tune-out’: “The powerlessness over the situation, the never ending number of victims, the difficulty of understanding the Balkan situation and ethnic conflicts, and the inability of the media to give a background, made the audience less interested, numb and even immune to the human suffering” (2004: 525).

11. Door is never fully open nor closed: “We should not idealize the audience, believing that all we need to do in order to awaken compassion and engagement is to expose people to pictures of humanitarian disasters. Neither should we believe the opposite, that the audience mainly turns away in cynicism and compassion fatigue, fed up with reports of expulsions, massacres, genocide, and terrorist and bomb attacks” (2004: 529).

12. Spectatorship between spectacles: • Stan Cohen in States of Denial (2001): “Our knowledge is not dependent on chance. It is permanent and continuous; those single moments when a crying Rwandan orphan appears on screen are reminders of what we already know…How do we carry on with normal life, knowing what we know”