2 - Theorizing Mediated Suffering: Ethics of Media Texts, Audiences and Ecologies

Summary

The media do not simply add a new element to the story, they transform it.

Sonia Livingstone, On the Mediation of Everything

As mentioned in the introductory chapter, to better understand the context of encountering suffering on television, it is important that we investigate audiences in their everyday lives. A focus on audiences can verify or challenge assumptions made in the traditionally Western-centric and highly normative literature on distant suffering and media witnessing. As discussed in chapter one, audience-centred research can explore tensions between normative theory and plural and culturally informed lay moralities. In particular, it is also able to capture the naturally-occurring responses of different people in relation to the poverty of television – both their specific interpretations of representations of poverty as well as their own lay moralities of good and bad media conduct in their very process of representation.

This book proposes however that we focus not solely on audiences. Rather, it is crucial to attend to the relationships that audiences have with media texts and media institutions at large. This book adopts a conceptualization of media as a process of mediation, one that accounts for the ‘circulation of meaning’ across different moments (Silverstone 1999, 13). Understanding media as a process requires extending the remit of analysis beyond the text or even the point of contact between text and audience and considers the dynamic nonlinear ‘circuit of meaning’ beyond the traditional model of producer/ text/audience (Livingstone 1999). This requires me to draw on existing work in media studies about mediation (Chouliaraki, 2006; Couldry, 2000, 2008b, 2012; Livingstone 2009; Madianou 2005b; Silverstone 1999, 2005, 2007; Thompson 1995) and argue for its significance as a theoretical guide for a critical analysis of media in late modern society.

Whilst the concept of mediation has been often used to describe how media logic has radically altered the conduct of politics (Couldry 2009; Silverstone 2005), its application to the study of the consequences of media to the experience of suffering potentially points to new ways of thinking about media ethics and audiences’ responsibility to vulnerable others.