Chapter 5 Flashcards
(126 cards)
1
Q
What means media representations of development?
A
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.
2
Q
What are the recurring criticisms of the humanitarian communication styles of campaigning centre on?
A
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.
3
Q
What is the central argument of this chapter?
A
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.
4
Q
What are the broader tensions affecting humanitarian communications?
A
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.
5
Q
How is defined mediation?
A
Dialectical and institutionally and technologically driven phenomenon that involves both overcoming distance in communication and the process of passing through the medium.
6
Q
Why is it preferable to use mediation instead of representation?
A
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.
7
Q
What does it suggests?
A
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.
8
Q
What are the two coexisting mutually dependent dimensions of mediation?
A
Immediacy and hypermediacy.
9
Q
What is immediacy?
A
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.
10
Q
What is hypermediacy?
A
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.
11
Q
Why are the concepts of mediation, immediacy and hypermediacy useful?
A
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).
12
Q
What is the definition of shock effect appeals?
A
NGO campaigns which aim to provoke feelings of guilt and pity in Western audiences through portrayals of extreme material poverty and suffering.
13
Q
Is shock effect imagery a purely historical phenomenon?
A
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.
14
Q
What is the first key feature of shock effect campaigns?
A
Their attempt to document the apparent plain reality or raw realism of suffering.
15
Q
What is the role of the medium in these campaigns?
A
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.
16
Q
What is the point of view of Machiel Lamers?
A
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.
17
Q
What is the point of view of Jorgen Lissner?
A
It exposes something in human life that is delicate and deeply personal as sexuality, which is, suffering.
18
Q
How shock effect approaches are intended to act upon audiences?
A
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.
19
Q
What is the evocation of a sense of guilt?
A
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.
20
Q
What is the point of view of Thomas Haskell?
A
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.
21
Q
What is another feature of humanitarian communication in the form of shock effect appeals?
A
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.
22
Q
How victims must be seen?
A
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.
23
Q
What is the point of view of Susan Moeller?
A
Only when victims have been identified as bona fide are they candidates for compassion.
24
Q
Why the frequent focus in shock effect imagery is on children?
A
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.
25
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.
26
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.
27
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.
28
What is the point of view of Stan Cohen?
These photos lack context – just the face, neck and shoulders of a crying ethnic child.
29
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.
30
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.
31
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.
32
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.
33
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.
34
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.
35
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.
36
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.
37
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.
38
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.
39
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.
40
What is the defence of this approach?
The financial benefits outweigh the ethical considerations.
41
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.
42
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.
43
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.
44
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.
45
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.
46
What is the real problem?
The media’s framework of reporting, rather than the public’s capacity to keep absorbing.
47
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.
48
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.
49
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.
50
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.
51
How are described these campaigns?
Reinforcing the strong cultural grounding in the North for paternalistic, charity-based and frequently neo-colonial development practices and projects.
52
What the tendency to focus on victims rather than de causes of suffering masks?
The need for a commitment to long-term structural change and conceals the complicity of actors in the North in shaping poverty and global inequality.
53
How are defined shock effect appeals?
A strategy of humanitarian communication which focuses on the raw reality of the suffering worthy victims in order to convey a situation that is urgent, open to remedy and real and provokes feeling of guilt and pity. While it may be seemingly effective at raising money for NGOs in the short term, it also has significant implications for global power relations, ethics and longer-term efforts at building a constituency of support for development. It also has a role to play in reinforcing a negative self-image of the people being portrayed and for migrants and diaspora communities.
54
How positive campaigns have emerged?
Shock effect approaches were the dominant form of humanitarian communication in many countries in Europe and North America up until the mid-1980s. In response to the criticisms, there was a distinct shift in the late 1980s and beyond towards the use of positive image appeals, often referred to as deliberate positivism.
55
What deliberate positivism refers to?
Humanitarian communications which focus on providing evidence of the direct, positive, effects that the actions of donors have allegedly had on beneficiaries.
56
What is the role of the medium in deliberate positivism?
Provide evidence of the reality in deliberate positivism is to provide evidence of the reality of the lives of development partners. It also preferences immediacy over hypermediacy. Unlike shock effect approaches, the testimony provided by the medium is used to reflect the individuality, dignity and agency of individuals.
57
How subjects are personalized?
By being named, being given a voice, or by being depicted in situations which may confound existing stereotypes.
58
How this personalization presents individuals?
As possessing a greater degree of agency and of being more humanized, or like us.
59
Why is this significant?
Because it invites the audience to acknowledge, to some extent, the sense of shared humanity between themselves and the subject. The appeal for audiences to act within these campaigns is based, partly, on a sense of empathy, or feeling for fellow human beings who are, or were, suffering.
60
To what correspond the individualization in deliberate positivism?
The appeal to empathy is combined with an attempt to demonstrate that the donor is able to make a concrete contribution to improve a sufferer’s life.
61
What is the role of the text?
To provide evidence for the audience that their actions can lead to positive and demonstrable change. In this way, it directly challenges the sense of compassion fatigue, or powerlessness, seemingly generated by the repeated use of shock effect appeals.
62
What particular emotion by which this appeal to act operates?
Gratitude. A smiling face, for example, connotates, not only that circumstances have been improved, but also a sense of the relief of being having saved. It provides subtle evidence of gratitude for the alleviation of suffering by a benefactor.
63
What are the differences between shock effect approaches and positive images?
Shock effect approaches work through activating feelings of guilt and pity, positive images work through activating emotions of gratitude and empathy.
64
How positive images approaches differ from shock effect campaigns?
Because of their tendency to focus on longer-term development issues rather than short-term aid and humanitarian relief.
65
Why is deliberate positivism particularly attractive for NGOs in some context?
Because it better reflects and supports an ideology of development interventions based on challenging longer-term causes of poverty and inequality
66
What is the role of NGO appeal strategies?
They play a role, not just in fund-raising or public awareness, but in providing legitimacy and political leverage for NGOs. Choosing positive images over shock effect appeals can be as much a statement about the brand, politics or ideology of the NGO, as an attempt to raise funds.
67
What unites positive image and shock effect approach?
Both rely on generating a sense of realism in order to produce appeals for action.
68
What is the assumption about positive images?
They are more representative of the true lives of development partners, because they attempt to reflect their dignity and self-determination, their evidence of truth is no more complete than in shock effect approaches.
69
What these campaigns have been accused of?
Of only focusing on the small-scale, short-term, positive effects of fund-raising and of glossing over the very real miseries and intractability of suffering. Such campaigns often reproduce stereotypes of an idyllic agrarian third world, populated only by farmers on their smallholdings.
70
How are described a collection of such campaign material?
As consisting mostly of depictions of rural life and primary producers with few pictures of urban areas, industrial production, artistic expression or cultural life. There is almost no sense of context.
71
How the strategy of deliberate positivism still conceals crucial aspects of the complexity of development?
Just as shock effect do, deliberate positivism fails to critically address the hegemony of neoliberal politics in world economy, the competitive governance milieu in which NGOs operate, the conditions of marketization and mediation on which legitimacy rests, the problematic links between NGOs, and local regimes, as well as the lack of local infrastructures often leading to failures of development. In suppressing these complex dimensions of development, positive appeals seem to lack a certain reflexivity as to the limits of the interventionist project to promote sustainable social change.
72
How deliberate positivism ensures that they remain objects of our generosity?
While deliberate positivism appears to empower through discourses of dignity and agency, the continued reliance on charitable donations as a means of action. Charitable Northern interventions are still the only way to create happiness in the South. This reinforcing of asymmetries of power between North and South is compounded by a reliance on gratitude, which sustains a clear hierarchy of human life between the grateful receiver and the benevolent donor.
73
Why deliberate positivism has been accused of fostering resistance to action?
While deliberate positivism may set out to combat the sense of compassion fatigue generated by shock effect approaches, it too has been accused of fostering resistance to action – in this case by promoting the idea that help isn’t needed.
74
How deliberate action can run the risk of presenting the problems as having been fully addressed?
By providing evidence of the apparent progress achieved as a result of development assistance, deliberate positivism runs the risk of presenting the problems as having been fully addressed, thus leading to inaction on the grounds that everything is already taken care of. If people are portrayed as not asking for your help, why then should you offer this help?
75
Is the deliberate positivism a safer option?
It is just the safest way out of criticisms of negative imagery? It might appear to be safer option than shock effect images, there is a little ideological variation between the resulting texts.
76
Why can we describe both approaches as part of realist impasse?
They both conceal the complexities of development, reproduce hierarchies of human life and potentially foster resistance to action. It is more helpful to describe the both approaches as part of a realist impasse in humanitarian communication, in which NGOs are reliant upon images which claim to document reality.
77
On what is based the reliance on mediation as immediacy?
Based on a faith in the power of knowledge, or the idea that if only people knew, if they were confronted with sufficient evidence of suffering, they would act.
78
What is the crisis of pity?
Given the apparent failure of both forms of humanitarian communication to generate sustained large-scale public action vis-à-vis distant suffering, it appears that such assumptions about the power of knowing may be somewhat misguided. In response, a new form of post-humanitarian communication has emerged, which appears to overcome this realist impasse.
79
How are defined post-humanitarian campaigns?
Campaigns which break with both the aesthetic conventions and the moral mechanisms of conventional humanitarian appeals (such as shock effect campaigns and positive imagery). Public action towards distant suffering is based on low intensity emotional regimes or regimes of emotion towards suffering which do not quite inspire or enact grand emotion such as guilt and pity, or empathy and gratitude.
80
How these low-intensity emotional regimes appear?
Not as immediate emotions that may inspire action, but as objects of contemplation to be reflected upon.
81
Where is the emotional focus?
The focus of any emotional response here is primarily on the self rather than on the suffering other, who is often entirely absent from the campaign.
82
What is the second key feature of the moral mechanism through which post-humanitarian communication works?
Simplicity. This refers to the requirement for relatively undemanding actions in response to suffering, often online, such as signing an online petition, clicking a donate button or following a link to an NGO website. Such immediate, on-the-spot, actions allow for instant gratification in response to suffering as they do not require a commitment to a cause for any length of time.
83
What does the simplicity also refers to?
To the lack of apparent justification in the appeals. Whereas shock effect appeals and deliberate positivism both draw on universal discourses of ethics (and consequently risk evolving a sense of compassion fatigue), post-humanitarian communication abandons attempts to tell audiences how they should feel when confronted with suffering. Indeed, suffering other are themselves often entirely absent from such campaigns. Instead, they rely on the reputation and image of the organizational brand itself to signal the nature and value of the cause.
84
How post-humanitarian achieve this break from appeals to grand emotions?
Post-humanitarian communication adopts alternative aesthetic conventions. Rather than attempt to document the reality of distant suffering, post-humanitarian communication relies on clever or ironic images, such as playful textualities or textual games include abstract art or graphic animations.
85
Why post-humanitarian communication favours hypermediacy over immediacy?
Because of its reliance on various combinations of image, sound, text, animation and video, which draw attention to the act of seeing itself.
86
What is the intention of such practices?
To challenge attempts to present the truth of suffering from which compassion fatigue derives, and instead draw attention to the problem of accurately representing suffering itself a part of their appeal to act upon it.
87
How post-humanitarian invite audiences to engage in reflexive particularism?
By drawing attention to the presence of the medium (hypermediacy), rather than trying to mask its existence (immediacy). In doing so, it invites audiences to engage, not in grand emotions, but in reflexive particularism or to rely on our own judgement as to whether public attention is possible or desirable in any particular instance.
88
By what is characterized post-humanitarian communication?
A reliance on textual games rather than on realism and by a corresponding appeal to low intensity emotional regimes and short-term forms of agency, rather than grand emotions and sustained commitment.
89
What is the strength of post-humanitarian communication?
It lies not necessarily in its ability to raise money, but in its relevance in an increasingly defragmented, commercialized and competitive media environment. This may make it well suited to achieving alternative objectives such as brand differentiation, retaining or reaching specific audiences, advocacy or influencing international policy arenas.
90
How is the emergence of post-humanitarian communication a logical response to the compassion fatigue generated by convention humanitarian campaigns?
By relying on appeals to a universal morality and by seeking to activate grand emotions through realist representational practices, conventional humanitarian campaigns fail to recognize our inherent inability to act on all instances of distant suffering.
91
What is the response of post-humanitarian communication to this?
Post-humanitarian communication not only accepts the problems inherent in acting at a distance but defines itself through the explicit articulation of this issue.
92
On what is grounded solidarity with the suffering in post-humanitarian communication?
Not on a direct engagement with the distant other and with a complex understanding of their circumstances, but on self-reflection.
93
How post-humanitarian communication reproduces an even more extreme inequality of human life than conventional humanitarian campaigns?
By dehumanizing distant others to the point of non-existence. Instead of enabling us to hear their voice and get an insight into their lives, it treats distant others as voiceless props that evoke responses more than shadow figures in someone else’s story.
94
From what issues post-humanitarian communication suffers?
Reproducing unequal power relations and failing to educate or inspire sustained commitment from audiences. Strategies of humanitarian communication based on hypermediacy are no less problematic than those based on immediacy.
95
What is one key issues in NGO campaigns of all forms?
The tendency to simplify development issues. The traditional technologies used to communicate these campaigns can be accused of compounding such simplifications.
96
How web technologies might appear to offer an opportunity?
They offer the opportunity for more complex, nuanced and multidimensional portrayals of the global South.
97
What is the difference between traditional media and new technologies?
Traditional media provides audiences with the bigger picture, but the internet is better suited to answering specific questions and providing personal points of connection with people and issues.
98
How can the internet be useful?
The internet can help us better visualise and know a place: articles can be backed with links, stories can be supplemented with refugee narratives, a full array of photos can be used.
99
Why NGO’s campaigns remains unaffected by a shift online of revealing the complexities of development?
It is generally not in the interests of NGOs to reveal the difficulties and compromises of development work to their supporter, whether their campaigns are online or offline, because complex explanations are always likely to inhibit charitable donations. In contemporary information societies where there is fierce competition for audience attention, humanitarian communications almost inevitably need to omit detail in order to grab attention quickly and be clear in their messaging. While new media may offer NGOs the opportunity to provide more complex accounts of poverty and development they do not affect the drivers which influence their willingness to do so.
100
What is a major issue with the use of traditional media technologies in NGO campaigns?
They do not afford the opportunity of immediate action. Furthermore, the form of action most often demanded in conventional humanitarian communication is charitable giving, which, as has been argued reinforces a particular humanitarian narrative in which only Northern charity can resolve problems in the South.
101
How new technologies supply us with new ways of acting at a distance?
Our feelings of moral obligation can stay the same; all that changes is an expansion of the range of opportunities available to us.
102
What does this range of opportunity includes?
Signing online petitions, making instant ethical purchases, sharing information, recruiting volunteers and organizing offline campaign activities.
103
How taking action online brings its own set of issues?
It is making it ever easier for users to participate in campaigns, albeit in a range of different ways, may promote nothing more than the illusion of involvement. Suggesting that a few non-committal, low-effort, mouse clicks is all that is required for social change serves to reinforce the prevailing status quo.
104
What is the point of view of Micah White?
Clicktivism is to activism as McDonalds is to a slow-cooked meal. It may looked like food, but the life-giving nutrients are long gone.
105
What are the cost of keeping the barriers to entry low?
By asking supporters to commit only minimal time or money to the cause, barriers to leaving a relationship with an NGO will also be low.
106
What is the result?
A shallow and fleeting engagement with issues that helps to alleviate any residual feelings of guilt or responsibility for not having taken action.
107
What is the key question of new technologies?
Whether they are more likely to provoke a sustained commitment to action or fuel a race to the bottom of political engagement.
108
Of what has been accused traditional media technologies used by NGO campaigns?
Reflecting and consolidating the unequal power relations between the global North and South. Old media technologies allow for the safe to watch the suffering, but not vice-versa.
109
Where is the power imbalance evident?
In the audiences’ ability to turn away from encounters with distant suffering when they choose, in contrast to suffering others themselves who cannot escape the reality of suffering so easily.
110
What is the point of view of Jean Baudrillard?
The mediated face makes no demand on us, because we have the power to switch it off, and to withdraw.
111
Of what the properties of the television screen have been held responsible?
For anesthetizing audiences from the moral demands of distant suffering. There is, comfortingly, a glass screen to which their lives are confined. They become flattened out, a property only of the screen, a surface, denied any moral compulsion because they are disembodied and disindividulated something other than human.
112
What capacity new media have that traditional technologies do not?
New media technologies may appear to have the capacity to overcome the distance between audiences and suffering others and to challenge entrenched hierarchies of human life in ways which traditional technologies do not. New media technologies can allow distant others to speak for themselves and even converse directly and in real time with audiences through web chats, forums and social media. They also provide users with the opportunity to immerse themselves in other (virtual) worlds.
113
How the potential anesthetizing role of the medium persists?
There is a danger that in remediating, or combining, old forms of media, new media technologies contribute to the fictionalization of distant suffering.
114
How new technologies can render audiences ineffectual virtual tourists rather than engaged and active global citizens?
Online media simply provide new ways to fetishize suffering or exoticize the other rather than eliciting genuine concern for a cause.
115
What is the result of the internet users have a tendency to stick to what they are familiar and comfortable with?
Users without pre-existing interests in development are unlikely to search for, or stumble across, development content online. By contrast, chance encounters with distant others are much more likely on television, where serendipity plays a much greater role in determining consumption habits.
116
Why new media does not automatically negate all power differentials between the North and the South?
The digital divide ensures that such conversations will still likely be mediated, either by local elites who have greater access and control over local technologies, or by NGOs, which can regulate the format and even the content of such exchanges.
117
What is the wider point?
While new technologies may provide alternative, and probably more complex, combinations of mediation as immediacy and hypermediacy, encounters with distant suffering online remain mediated encounters. The medium will always interfere in some way in the process of overcoming distance between audiences and distant others.
118
How NGO campaigns are more deeply rooted than technology alone?
Regarding hierarchies of human life, the very real economic and political divisions which exist in the world stem, not from technologies of communication, but from differences in economic resources, political stability, governmental regimes and, ultimately, unequal relationships of power. Technologies may reflect and even reinforce discourses of global inequality, they do not produce them. It is difficult not to reflect such hierarchies of human life when the justification for NGOs work relies upon them.
119
What are the key tensions regarding the complexities of development?
The need for fund-raising means that it is not in the interests of most NGOs to reveal the full realities of suffering and of their imperfect efforts to alleviate it.
120
What are the key tensions regarding action?
A sustained commitment to effective action vis-à-vis distant suffering is contingent upon far more than the strategies or technologies used by NGO campaigns.
121
How audiences respond to the various promises NGO campaigns make about the efficacy of the actions they suggest depends upon?
Individual personalities and personal circumstances. More broadly, the range of options for action audiences have open to them and the actual effects of those actions depend upon much larger political, economic and institutional realities.
122
How new technologies appear to have the capacity to ameliorate some of the key tensions associated with NGO campaigns?
By providing more context and greater opportunities for action, and challenging power asymmetries. However, certain tensions are deeply rooted in economic differences and political and geographical realities which cannot be redressed with technology. New technologies may be a useful tool, but it is the constraints faced by those using them which will determine the nature of their use.
123
Is there an ideal strategy of humanitarian communication?
All forms of humanitarian communication, through whatever medium, are subject to the same inherent tensions, to which there are no clear solutions. The tendency to simplify communications, will remain as long as NGO communications have to compete for the fleeting attention of a largely cynical public in order to raise money.
124
How is it useful to conceive different forms of humanitarian communication?
Not as better or worse examples of representations, but as attempts to overcome distance in communication through alternative combinations of immediacy and hypermediacy.
125
What are the differences of medium between humanitarian communication approaches?
Whereas shock effects and deliberate positivism favour immediacy over hypermediacy, post-humanitarian communication preferences hypermediacy. New technologies may appear to offer more sophisticated forms of mediation, but ultimately the presence of the medium will always interfere with the process of overcoming distance between audiences and distant others.
126
What the role of media in development must recognize?
The fact that the media are not an independent force acting upon society but are shaped by their relations with other processes in society.
