3 - Audience Ethics: Mediating Suffering in Everyday Life

Summary

[What] has brought about the chaos and decay which has become the monument of the city […] is the crisis of conflicting desires and social practices, caused by the intensification of the constitutive contradictions of capital.

Neferti Tadiar, Fantasy-Production

Drawing primarily from life story interviews and participant observation with upper-, middle- and lower-class people in Manila, this chapter analyses the moment of consumption in the mediation process. I specifically explore people's affinities towards local television and reflect on their significance to specific audience ethics debates about the significance of mediated engagement with the public world (discussed in chapter two). Whether people tune in or ‘switch off’ in relation to other people's suffering on television is regarded in the literature as a moral issue that audiences negotiate in their everyday lives (Cohen 2001; Seu 2003). And whether they seek out information, donate to charity or speak up against the suffering of others – ‘even if this speech is initially no more than an internal whisper’ (Boltanski 1999, 20) – are actions that scholars expect of an audience ‘morally culpable’ to ‘take that responsibility’ insofar as media enable connection (and disconnection) with vulnerable others (Silverstone 2007, 128).

This chapter uncovers that these philosophical norms play out in a contested – and class-conflicted – milieu in the specific ethnographic context of the Philippines. It exemplifies the class-informed moral judgements about the ‘poverty of television’, where upper-class respondents’ avoidance of over-representation of suffering and lower-class respondents’ affective consumption of media content that reflects the hardship of their lives are ultimately expressive of classed moralities about media. I demonstrate in this chapter that media consumption here is reflective of, even an amplification of, class inequalities as elites turn to international and particularistic media with minimal consumption of ‘depressing’ Philippine media. Lower-class audiences meanwhile turn to local media not just for entertainment or information but also for the material rewards – and social services such as health care and legal advice – that television networks offer along with their televised content. A class-divided metropolis, with parallel and occasionally intersecting ‘zones of safety’ and ‘zones of danger’ (Chouliaraki 2006, 83), shares an equally divided media environment. I argue that this division is not purely a product of personal differences in taste but is indicative of classed moralities that underpin everyday taste judgments, following the important sociological insights of Skeggs (2004) and Sayer (2005).