Chapter 5 Flashcards
What means media representations of development?
It is concerned with the causes, content and consequences of media representations of development and of the global South, as they are communicated to audiences in the global North.
What are the recurring criticisms of the humanitarian communication styles of campaigning centre on?
How the need for NGO work is justified, what forms of action audiences are invited to take, and whether NGO communications reinforce or challenge discourses of global inequality.
What is the central argument of this chapter?
There is no ideal form of humanitarian communication, only a series of similarly problematic compromises in response to the intractable and often irresolvable tensions inherent within NGO communications. Humanitarian communications should always seek to maximize the potential for dignity, understanding, proximity and effective action.
What are the broader tensions affecting humanitarian communications?
Inherent difficulty of taking effective action to address faraway suffering, the challenge of avoiding reproducing hierarchies of human life when this is at the hearth of NGOs’ work, and the inescapable influence of broader political and commercial drivers of NGO appeals.
How is defined mediation?
Dialectical and institutionally and technologically driven phenomenon that involves both overcoming distance in communication and the process of passing through the medium.
Why is it preferable to use mediation instead of representation?
Because it does a better job of capturing the complex ways in which media are implicated in the relationship between audiences and distant suffering, beyond making images and narratives available.
What does it suggests?
Media affect the ways in which individuals experience space and time and therefore that they can bring distant suffering closer to audiences, while at the same time recognizing that the presence of the medium interferes with this process.
What are the two coexisting mutually dependent dimensions of mediation?
Immediacy and hypermediacy.
What is immediacy?
A style of visual representation whose goal is to make the viewer forget the presence of the medium and believe that he is in the presence of the object of representation. This is the dimension of mediation which allows for images and scenes audiences witness to act upon their emotions as if what they were watching were real. It draws our attention to the process of overcoming distance in communication. Media do not simply bring things closer to us.
What is hypermediacy?
A style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium. It is this dimension of mediation which allows audiences to recognize that the experiences we have when consuming media are brought about through the presence of a medium, such as through the on-screen ribbons of text, photographs and graphics on twenty-four-hours news channels.
Why are the concepts of mediation, immediacy and hypermediacy useful?
They help us to move away from imprecise and normative judgement about positive or negative strategies and instead suggests that all forms of humanitarian communication are essentially different ways of attempting to overcome the distance between audiences and faraway others through various strategies of mediation (or combinations of immediacy and hypermediacy).
What is the definition of shock effect appeals?
NGO campaigns which aim to provoke feelings of guilt and pity in Western audiences through portrayals of extreme material poverty and suffering.
Is shock effect imagery a purely historical phenomenon?
No, shock effect campaigns still form a substantial proportion of INGOs’ messages’ today. They appear in form of daytime television advertisements run by Save the Children and often in campaigns associated with humanitarian crises, such as the 2011 East Africa famine and the Syrian refugee crisis.
What is the first key feature of shock effect campaigns?
Their attempt to document the apparent plain reality or raw realism of suffering.
What is the role of the medium in these campaigns?
Provide evidence as compelling as possible of the physical condition of suffering, so that audiences cannot deny its existence. Shock effect campaigns focus on immediacy rather than hypermediacy. Such attempts to overcome the distance between audiences and distant suffering through confronting audiences with the bare life of faraway strangers are often achieved through a fetishizing of the body. The camera focuses, close up, on naked or semi-naked bodies to provide graphic evidence of malnourishment, for example.
What is the point of view of Machiel Lamers?
In some cases it is only the children’s eyes that are portrayed, the face or just a hand. It is this fetishizing of the body which has prompted comparisons with pornography. Just as sexual pornography involves the exposing of the raw reality of life – or a pornography of poverty.
What is the point of view of Jorgen Lissner?
It exposes something in human life that is delicate and deeply personal as sexuality, which is, suffering.
How shock effect approaches are intended to act upon audiences?
They act upon the specific emotional responses of pity and guilt. Pity is a response to the witnessing of the spectacle of many people suffering through no apparent fault of their own and is generated through the focus on raw reality.
What is the evocation of a sense of guilt?
It is a little more complex. It derives from the logic of complicity, whereby our failure to act, despite our being witness to the horrors of suffering, leaves us in some way complicit in the suffering of distant others.
What is the point of view of Thomas Haskell?
While we may not be invited to regard ourselves as the direct cause of suffering, if we recognize that our refusal to act when confronted with distant suffering is a necessary condition for the suffering to persist, then we still remain, to some extent, causally involved. We can no longer say we didn’t know, and now that we know, if we are not part of solution, we are, in effect, part of the problem. In order to alleviate the resulting feeling of guilt we are compelled to take action, most often in the form of charitable giving. The simpler the action – buy, red, save lives – the more guilty you should feel if you still do not take it.
What is another feature of humanitarian communication in the form of shock effect appeals?
They rely, not simply on the representation of victims, but on the construction of sufferers as ideal victims. Discourses of global compassion circulated by media and implied by international politics designate some victims as more worthy, or deserving of our pity, than others.
How victims must be seen?
In order for humanitarian communications to attempt to generate the strongest response, victims must be seen as both innocent and helpless. If victims are understood to be somehow culpable in their own suffering or responsible for the suffering of others, then they are unlikely to generate pity. If victims are able to act in some way to relieve their own suffering, then this may diminish the perceived need for external assistance.
What is the point of view of Susan Moeller?
Only when victims have been identified as bona fide are they candidates for compassion.
Why the frequent focus in shock effect imagery is on children?
It is explained by the requirement for innocence and helplessness. Everybody understands that you need to protect a child and take care of a child because of its vulnerability and innocence.
What images of powerless children appeal to?
Parenting instincts of care and protection and generate pity through our own memory of being open and vulnerable to the treachery of adulthood.
What is the result of the study of Lamers?
The most frequently appearing images over the last thirty five years were of a child – appearing in around 50% of posters. A focus on children is often central to many definitions of shock effect imagery.
What is a further feature of shock effect approaches?
These styles of campaigns are utterly victim centred, in that the focus is entirely on the condition of the sufferer rather than the cause or explanations of the suffering. In shock effect approaches, documenting the reality of suffering is given precedence over attempts to explain the complex, longer-term, structural causes of suffering.
What is the point of view of Stan Cohen?
These photos lack context – just the face, neck and shoulders of a crying ethnic child.
What is the difference between the logic of appearances and the logic of causality?
A logic of appearances in which causality is presented as being dictated by the immediate context rather than historical circumstances, as opposed to a logic of causality in which the longer-term consequences and more subtle contexts are revealed. As its most extreme, a logic of appearances presents events as naturalized, or simply as the kind of thing that happens over there.
What is part of a wider humanitarian narrative?
This logic of appearances and focus on the victim are part of a wider humanitarian narrative that shock effect campaigns conform to, which depicts helpless victims being confronted by localized problems to which only the aid organization in question can respond.
Why are stories of social suffering important?
They have become stories of humanitarian intervention. This narrative is necessary for creating clear and direct link between accounts of what is happening, why it is happening and what we can do about it – thereby providing a simple and direct reason for giving money.
What is the assumption here?
Introducing complexities can provide alibis for passivity by inviting audiences to feel their monetary contribution may not directly contribute to improving the situation.
What is the first criticism of shock effect campaigns?
The first criticism is made on moral grounds and contends that such images deprive the sufferers depicted, and the many more individuals they are used to represent, of their dignity.
How are these campaigns described?
The worst images that exploit the poor for little more than voyeuristic ends and where people are portrayed as helpless, passive objects.
What is this criticism linked to?
The claim that these campaigns are unrepresentative or that they provide a distortion of reality. If the media portrayal of the developing world is understood to be so distorted that it deceives audiences about their true position in the world then we have a moral duty to reform it.
Why is there tension here?
Because while these campaigns may be interpreted as lacking respect for people’s dignity and privacy, or as being misleading by omissions, representativeness is a problematic criterion by which to judge NGO communications.
What is the argument of Robert Martin?
Parts of Africa are places of famine and disease and not to report on such topics would itself be a distortion.
What is the argument of Cohen?
Why demand that they are an accurate statistical sample? Surely the point is to represent the problem at its worst… If they had to think each tome about representativeness rather than representation, this would undermine, not to say miss the whole point of – their work. I believe unless negative imagery is allowed to speak for itself, the universality of suffering will never be acknowledge.
What is the consensus in the NGO sector?
Born out of extensive experience and research, shock effect campaigns are still the most effective at raising funds, particularly for urgent humanitarian appeals. This is the main reason why NGOs continue to use them. While such campaigns may raise important ethical issues, they also raise more money than any other style of campaign, thereby allowing NGOs to perform their work.
What is the defence of this approach?
The financial benefits outweigh the ethical considerations.
What is the main challenge of this particular argument?
Although shock effect campaigns may be effective at fund-raising in the short term, they have more damaging long-term implications both for public awareness and fund-raising efforts.
How is used the notion of compassion fatigue?
In this context, ii is used to refer to the perceived general sense of audience apathy towards the wider world in which the public are subsequently less inclined to engage in overseas giving as a result of the repeated use of the same disaster narratives in the media.
What is the compassion fatigue thesis?
The apparent indifference to global suffering is the result of the tendency of the media to present problems but not their solutions, an emphasis on the sensational and a lack of context.
What is the boomerang effect?
The people’s resistance to the negativity of campaigns themselves. Contributing to this sense of compassion fatigue is a seemingly well-entrenched tendency for audiences to resist campaigns which are designed to make them feel guilt or pity.
Why is the concept of compassion fatigue criticised?
Publics in the global North (and South) may have a general resistance to shock effect NGO campaigns. The concept of compassion fatigue has been widely criticized for being over-sued, vague as a description and even vaguer as an explanation. It lacks clarity as a way of describing public dispositions towards distant others, it is used to mean different things in different situations, and operates via different causal chains accordingly.
What is the real problem?
The media’s framework of reporting, rather than the public’s capacity to keep absorbing.
What is the accusation towards shock effect campaigns from a more critical perspective?
Reinforcing a hierarchy of human life between the lives of those in front of the television screens and those suffering on them.
How are the notion of Northern supremacy reinforced?
Through the reproduction of the idea that benevolent donors in the North are the primary source of solutions for the problems of the South.
How is the inferiority of the global South maintained?
By the myth of their powerlessness, or inability to help themselves. These colonial visions are compounded by the iconography of childhood, whereby picture of children symbolize the weak, vulnerable and dependent position that developing countries have in relation to the stronger, richer and more dominant developed countries.
Why the naturalizing of the power relations between the West and the rest are important?
Because it promotes a development agenda that is deeply anti-political, or as an aid assistance imagination.
