Global Moral Spectatorship in the Age of Social Media, Vol. 23 - 2016, No. 4
Guest Edited by Mette Mortensen and Hans-Jörg Trenz
Media Morality and Visual Icons in the Age of Social Media: Alan Kurdi and the Emergence of an Impromptu Public of Moral Spectatorship
New and social media are increasingly used to raise issues of global justice. Images and texts representing distant suffering in an emotionally charged way involve users of social media in debates about ethical standards and moral responsibility. This raises the question of how social media users react to such evidence about instances of distant suffering. How and under which conditions are users’ involvement in discourses of global justice enhancing new practices of civic engagement and redefining the boundaries of solidarity? Our point of departure is the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe in fall 2015, which raised questions of distant spectatorship and moral responses with renewed urgency and immediacy. We consider the conditions of collective reception and interpretation of visual icons of human suffering, which became viral through social media in this period. We first situate social media reception in the framework for the analysis of moral spectatorship. We secondly explore the link between iconic images and the emergence of so-called impromptu publics of moral spectatorship. As an empirical case, we refer to the performance of reddit discussion groups in confronting the salient images of Alan Kurdi, the drowned boy from Syria found at the beach in Turkey in September 2015.
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“Despicable, Disgusting, Repulsive!!!” Public Emotions and Moralities in Online Discussions About Violence Towards Refugees
This article analyses the affective-discursive work that the image of an anti-asylum seeker demonstrator dressed like a member of the Ku Klux Klan and waving a Finnish flag generated on online platforms in Finland. Specifically, the article focuses on how the vocabulary of disgust served to draw boundaries between “us” and “others”, thus reconstructing hierarchies of human worth and deservingness. The aim of the article is to discuss the role of disgust and related emotions in relation to what has become known as the European refugee crisis and whether the language of disgust allows for solidarity with the plight of asylum seekers.
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Moral Spectatorship and Its Discourses: The “Mediapolis” in the Swedish Refugee Crisis
This presentation seeks to specify key features of the civic response to the unprecedented numbers of refugees who arrived in Sweden during the autumn of 2015, and how civic engagement was mobilized. The discussion underscores the theme of moral spectatorship, using Silverstone’s concept of mediapolis, while the analysis highlights the various contingencies that can shape civic engagement. The empirical starting point is the shifting events and political decisions, along with the rapid evolution of the prevailing- and counter-discourses, that came to impact on the extent and character of Swedish mediated moral witnessing and its practical manifestations. While the major media defined the overall contours of the events, social media were also adding their interpretations (countering as well as supporting the dominant narrative) and providing links to civic practices. After a summary of the socio-political events, I examine the various discursive vectors at play in the situation, both traditional ones that provide a certain starting baseline as well as newer ones that arose in the course the events. I briefly locate these vectors in the context Sweden’s historical self-image and experiences with immigration, highlighting the discursive subject positions offered and pre-dispositions of various groups.
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“Tinder Humanitarians”: The Moral Panic Around Representations of Old Relationships in New Media
According to the company website, Tinder is a mobile phone application for “friends, dates, relationships, and everything in between”. Cody Clarke, a writer and filmmaker, documents screenshots of photographs from the closed network of Tinder to publicly “out” users of the site who post photographs showing themselves in some “do-gooding” relationship that appears to take place in the South. Through the posting of a new photograph every day, the “Humanitarians of Tinder” Tumblr blog and Facebook page have generated a public discussion on the politics of representing suffering strangers in attempts to enhance the appeal of western image producers. This article will investigate the phenomenon of the Humanitarians of Tinder in order to understand its representations of North–South relations from the photographs themselves and from the debates held around them in new media and old. Critical development studies, media studies and sociology will provide an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to understand the moral panic that these Tinder humanitarians have created through posting private photographs of humanitarian performances to increase their personal desirability.
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Concluding Comment: Moral Responsibility and Civic Responsiveness: Spectacles of Suffering on Digital Media
This special section brings together four original contributions on an emerging problematic around moral spectatorship—the problematic of when, how and to which effect citizens respond to mediated suffering on digital platforms. In my brief commentary, I draw on insights from these four contributions to reflect on two themes that emerge as central to this problematic: the conditions of possibility for digital moral spectatorship and the resources of reflexivity that constitute digital spectatorship as online action.
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