Blog entry 3: Care or don’t care?
On the evening of 15 April, a shock wave went through Europe because the Notre Dame was on fire. Everyone seemed to turn to social media to share their last memory with the building. But did we care as much for the 321 people, also Western tourists, that died in the terror attacks of Sri Lanka on the 21st of April? It’s fair to say we were startled by the news of the terror attacks, but not to the extent that we were shocked when we saw the Notre Dame on fire. How come?
Communitarianism by Stijn Joye explains why we feel this way. People feel more empathy towards people who are similar to them because this makes identification easier. Therefore, people have a difficult time identifying with distant others. But this isn’t the only issue. Joye states that geographical and cultural proximity also play a very important role. This shows why people feel more affected by events to happen nearby than far away and in turn explains why we, as Europeans, were so affected by the fire in Notre Dame, while the news about the terror attacks in Sri Lanka didn’t seem to have such a big impact on us.
Joye further argues that it is through the media that Western audiences receive information about distant suffering. What Western audiences know about disasters in distant countries is derived from what the media tell them. Therefore, the media are responsible for the way Western people look at distant others. The media have the power to classify the world into categories of ‘us’ against the ‘others’. Can’t the media do something about this? Yes, they can. Lilie Chouliaraki argues that the media have the potential to facilitate moral and emotional engagement from the spectators. This by presenting the distant event as close, relevant and worthy as possible. This will make us all care more about the distant sufferer or tragic distant event.
Let’s end this ‘us’ against the ‘others’ mentality and create a ‘we’ mentality!
Sources:
Chouliaraki, L. (2006). The spectatorship of suffering. London: Sage.
Joye, S. (2010). News discourses on distant suffering: A critical discourse analysis of the 2003 SARS outbreak. Discourse & Society, 21(5), 586–601.