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Media and compassion after digital war: Why digital media haven't transformed responses to human suffering in contemporary conflict

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2021

Andrew Hoskins
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Abstract

There is a persistent belief in the power of media images to transform the events they depict. Yet despite the instant availability of billions of images of human suffering and death in the continuous and connective digital glare of social media, the catastrophes of contemporary wars, such as in Syria and Yemen, unfold relentlessly. There are repeated expressions of surprise by some in the West when the dissemination of images of suffering and wars, particularly in mainstream news media, does not translate into a de-escalation of conflict.

In this article I consider today's loosening of the often presumed relationship between media representation, knowledge and response under the conditions of “digital war”. This is the digital disruption of the relationship between warfare and society in which all sides participate in the uploading and sharing of information on, and images and videos of, conflict.

Is it the case that the capacity of images of human injury and death to bring about change, and the expectation that they would stir practical intervention in wars, is and has been exaggerated? Even if we are moved or shocked upon being confronted by such images, does this translate into some form of action, individual or otherwise? In this article I contend that the saturation of information and images of human suffering and death in contemporary warfare has not ushered in a new era of “compassion fatigue”. Rather, algorithmically charged outrage is a proxy for effects. It is easy to misconstrue the velocity of linking and liking and sharing as some kind of mass action or mass movement.

Humanitarian catastrophes slowly unfold in an age of continuous and connective digital glare, and yet they are unseen. If the imploded battlefield of digital war affording the most proximate and persistent view of human suffering and death in history cannot ultimately mobilize radically effective forms of public response, it is difficult to imagine what will.

Keywords

digital warsocial mediaimageshuman sufferingcompassionhumanitarian crisesSyriaYemen
Type
Business and digital technologies in humanitarian crises
Information
International Review of the Red Cross , Volume 102 , Issue 913: Digital technologies and war , April 2020 , pp. 117 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of ICRC.

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to David Rieff and to Paul Slovic for their insights and for their generosity in speaking with me. I am also grateful to Shona Illingworth, Anthony Downey, Oliver Boyd-Barrett and the Review editorial team and anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments and advice. I am grateful for important feedback on early versions of this article presented at the 2016 VoxUkraine Conference, “The Power of Words: Responsibility of the Media and Challenges in 2017”, in Kiev, and at the 2019 staff–student seminar series at the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent.

References

1 See Fehrenbach, Heide and Rodogno, Davide, “‘A Horrific Photo of a Drowned Syrian Child’: Humanitarian Photography and NGO Media Strategies in Historical Perspective”, International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 97, No. 900, 2015CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In her article for this issue of the Review, entitled “The Camera and the Red Cross: ‘Lamentable Pictures’ and Conflict Photography Bring into Focus an International Movement, 1855–1865”, Sonya de Laat explores the role of combat photography in three major conflicts of the mid-nineteenth century “in expanding a shared vision of who constitutes humanity, and who is worth caring for”.

2 By “distant” I mean a predominantly Occidental and privileged position of safety from, and limited fear of, warfare. This idea of “distant suffering” has been associated with a “white saviour complex” narrative of humanitarian action, whereby the “West” goes in to help “distant” and “non-Western” parts of the world. This is also embedded in a history of the development of assumptions about the role of late twentieth-century media in war. But perceptions and meanings of “distance” are also transformed through digital war, a shift that I set out in this paper. For an influential work on this term, see Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering, trans. Graham Burchell, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999. See also Lilie Chouliaraki's idea of the “post-humanitarian” style of communication in a “dominant Western culture where the de-emotionalization of the suffering of distant others goes hand in hand with the over-emotionalization of our safe everyday life”: Chouliaraki, Lilie, “Post-Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Communication Beyond a Politics of Pity”, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2010, p. 122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Included in the range of this three-week- to seven-year-old spread of the top 10 search results (searching from a UK ISP on 29 January 2021) were a mix of mainstream media coverage and professional, amateur and unverifiable organizations supporting a particular side or group in the war. For example, a video with 2.3 million views entitled “Heavy Clashes during the Battle for Al-Ramouseh Aleppo | Syria War 2014” was uploaded by the “WarClashes” channel on 20 April 2014. The description reads, in part: “Heavy clashes erupted as various brigades attacked Al-Ramouseh district in Aleppo. The fighters managed to capture the district from the Syrian Army after fierce clashes went on for a couple days”. See: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwh49HgfyME&t=10s (all internet references were accessed in January 2021).

4 See, for instance, the work of the Syrian Archive group, available at: https://syrianarchive.org.

5 Andrew Hoskins, “The Radicalisation of Memory: Monuments and Memorials in a Post-Trust Era”, Keynote Talk, “Moving Monuments” Conference, Manchester Centre for Public History and Heritage, Manchester Metropolitan University, 20 April 2018.

6 Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins, Radical War: Data, Attention and Control in the 21st Century, forthcoming.

7 Compassion fatigue refers to the idea that on being too frequently confronted with, for example, a news image of a child emaciated through starvation or maimed by urban shelling, the “distant” “spectator” not living through humanitarian crises will not be sufficiently moved or outraged to challenge the policy-makers or donate to the aid organizations that might intervene in order to limit or stop the suffering and deaths of civilians under attack. See Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, Routledge, New York, 1999. For an influential critique of Moeller's work, see David Campbell, “The Myth of Compassion Fatigue”, in Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick (eds.), The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict, Routledge, London, 2020.

8 William Merrin, “Fight for the Users! Media Studies in the 21st Century”, Media Education Research Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2015, p. 61.

9 See S. D. Moeller, above note 7, for her influential work in this context.

10 One acclaimed example is the photograph taken in 2019 by the journalist Bashar al-Sheikh. See “Syrian Air Strike Sisters Photo: Behind the Image that Shocked the World”, BBC News, 1 August 2019, available at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-49186145/syria-air-strike-sisters-photo-behind-the-image-that-shocked-the-world.

11 There is a long history of “direct” media effects research in media studies – this is the idea that exposure to or consumption of mass media shapes individuals’ behaviour. David Gauntlett offers a useful critique of this work in arguing that “if, after over 60 years of a considerable amount of research effort, direct effects of media upon behaviour have not been clearly identified, then we should conclude that they are simply not there to be found”. David Gauntlett, “Ten Things Wrong with the Media ‘Effects’ model”, 2006, available at: https://davidgauntlett.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Ten-Things-Wrong-2006-version.pdf.

12 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books, New York, 1978.

13 Catherine Happer, Andrew Hoskins and William Merrin, “Weaponizing Reality: An Introduction to Trump's War on the Media”, in C. Happer, A. Hoskins and W. Merrin (eds), Trump's Media War, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2018, pp. 7–8.

14 See: https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/.

15 Catherine Happer and Andrew Hoskins, “Hacking the Archive: Media, Memory, and History in the Post-Trust Era”, in Michael Moss and David Thomas (eds), Post Truth Archives, Oxford University Press, Oxford, forthcoming.

16 C. Happer, A. Hoskins and W. Merrin, above note 13, pp. 14–15.

17 Tarek Abdelzaher et al., “The Paradox of Information Access: Growing Isolation in the Age of Sharing”, 2020, available at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.01967.pdf.

18 Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992.

19 To borrow from Todd Gitlin's classic text: see Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, and London, 1980.

20 Hereafter, I use “WMM” to refer to the Western news media in order to signify that historically there has been a concentration of news and other media ownership and/or production in rich Western countries (some also use the term “global North”). This includes, for example, the BBC, CNN, News Corp, Reuters and the picture agencies. This focus is pertinent to my key delineation of news cultures between the late twentieth-century “broadcast era” and today's digital media ecology. An important consideration is that the WMM were utterly defining of what “Western war” was (see Martin Shaw, The Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War and Its Crisis in Iraq, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2005). This includes CNN being mutually synonymous with the 1991 Gulf War, but importantly, this relationship between the WMM and warfare also influenced a significant trajectory of thought in the analysis of war and media from the early 1990s (see below). In the digital media ecology, the WMM remains influential but competes with (as well as being incorporated by) the US-based so-called “tech giants” of Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple, dominating how news and information is produced, seen or not seen.

21 See C. Happer, A. Hoskins and W. Merrin, above note 13, pp. 3–22. See also the refreshingly honest reflections of Jeff Jarvis over the past few years in his BuzzMachine blog, available at: https://buzzmachine.com.

22 Andrew Hoskins, Televising War: From Vietnam to Iraq, Continuum, London, 2004.

23 Steven Livingston, Clarifying the CNN Effect: An Examination of Media Effects According to Type of Military Intervention, Research Paper R-18, Joan Shorenstein Barone Centre on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1997.

24 See, for example, McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1994

25 Larry King Live, CNN, 17 January 1991, cited in Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin, Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007, pp. 38–39. See also Deirdre Boden and Andrew Hoskins, “Time, Space and Television”, paper presented at the 2nd Theory, Culture & Society Conference, “Culture and Identity: City, Nation, World”, Berlin, 11 August 1995.

26 Nik Gowing, Real-Time Television Coverage of Armed Conflicts and Diplomatic Crises: Does it Pressure or Distort Foreign Policy Decisions?, Working Paper 94-1, Joan Shorenstein Barone Centre on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1994.

27 See A. Hoskins and B. O'Loughlin, above note 25.

28 The original report was first broadcast on BBC1 on 23 October 1984.

29 Suzanne Franks, Reporting Disasters: Famine, Aid, Politics and the Media, C. Hurst & Co., London, 2013, p. 1.

30 A. Hoskins and B. O'Loughlin, above note 25, p. 131.

31 Ibid., p. 131.

32 Edmond J. Keller, “Drought, War, and the Politics of Famine in Ethiopia and Eritrea”, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4, 1992, p. 623.

33 S. Franks, above note 29.

34 It was not until the 1991 Gulf War, seven years later, that the 24-hour news cycle would take hold.

35 S. Franks, above note 29, pp. 2–3.

36 See also W. J. T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2005.

37 Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007, p. 131.

38 Harun Farocki, “Phantom Images”, Public, No. 29, 2004.

39 Trevor Paglen and Anthony Downey, “Algorithmic Anxieties: Trevor Paglen in Conversation with Anthony Downey”, Digital War, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2020, available at: https://doi.org/10.1057/s42984-020-00001-2.

40 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble, Penguin Books, London, 2012.

41 A. Hoskins, above note 22.

42 See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1964.

43 Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015, p. 127.

44 I use the term “post-scarcity” to indicate the abundance, pervasiveness and accessibility of communication networks, nodes and digital media content in this century compared with the “scarcity” culture of media content in the late twentieth century. See Andrew Hoskins, “7/7 and Connective Memory: Interactional Trajectories of Remembering in Post-Scarcity Culture”, Memory Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2011; Andrew Hoskins and John Tulloch, Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016.

45 Luciano Floridi, The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014, p. 42.

46 Ibid., pp. 42–43.

47 Tim O'Reilly, “The Architecture of Participation”, June 2004, available at: https://perma.cc/M7TH-EVBN?type=image.

48 See, for example, “100 Photos: Alan Kurdi”, Time, available at: http://100photos.time.com/photos/nilufer-demir-alan-kurdi.

49 Jamie Merrill, “Refugee Aid Charities See Surge in Donations after Image of Drowned Syrian Toddler Aylan Kurdi moves the nation”, The Independent, 3 September 2015, available at: www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/refugee-aid-charities-see-surge-in-donations-after-image-of-drowned-syrian-toddler-aylan-kurdi-moves-10484953.html.

50 Adam Withnall, “Aylan Kurdi Images Were Seen by ‘20 Million People in 12 Hours’”, The Independent, 15 December 2015, available at: www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/refugee-crisis-aylan-kurdi-images-were-seen-by-20-million-people-in-12-hours-new-study-suggests-a6774181.html. Note that Alan Kurdi was incorrectly referred to as “Aylan” in some early reporting on the incident.

51 Farida Vis and Olga Goriunova (eds), The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi, Visual Social Media Lab, University of Sheffield, 2015, available at: https://tinyurl.com/1r9cqlbm.

52 Ibid., p. 39.

53 UN, “Note to Correspondents: Transcript of Press Stakeout by United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, Mr. Staffan de Mistura”, Geneva, 22 April 2016, available at: www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/note-correspondents/2016-04-22/note-correspondents-transcript-press-stakeout-united.

54 See the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Operational Portal, available at: https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria.

55 UNHCR, “Syria”, fact sheet, October 2020, available at: www.unhcr.org/sy/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/12/Factsheet-Syria-October-2020-003.pdf.

56 OCHA, Humanitarian Response Plan: Syrian Arab Republic, December 2020, p. 7, available at: www.humanitarianresponse.info/sites/www.humanitarianresponse.info/files/documents/files/2020_syria_humanitarian_response_plan.pdf.

57 UNHCR, above note 55.

58 Megan Specia, “How Syria's Death Toll is Lost in the Fog of War”, New York Times, 13 April 2018, available at: www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/world/middleeast/syria-death-toll.html. The statement was made by the then Special Envoy: see UN, above note 53.

59 The Caesar images are a collection of 55,000 photographs alleging to show proof of torture or ill-treatment by Syrian government forces. See Garance le Caisne, “‘They Were Torturing to Kill’: Inside Syria's Death Machine”, The Guardian, 1 October 2015, available at: www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/01/they-were-torturing-to-kill-inside-syrias-death-machine-caesar.

60 Fred Ritchin, “Syrian Torture Archive: When Photographs of Atrocities Don't Shock”, Time, 28 January 2014, available at: http://time.com/3426427/syrian-torture-archive-when-photographs-of-atrocities-dont-shock/.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Robert J. Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1991. See also Paul Slovic, “Psychic Numbing and Genocide”, Judgement and Decision Making, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2007.

64 Paul Slovic, telephone interview with author, 12 April 2018, on file with author.

65 See Raya Jalabi, “Images of Syrian Torture on Display at UN: ‘It Is Imperative We Do Not Look Away’”, The Guardian, 11 March 2015, available at: www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/11/images-syrian-torture-shock-new-yorkers-united-nations.

66 See, for example, Stav Ziv, “A Plea for Action: Gruesome Photos Smuggled From Syria on Display at U.N.”, Newsweek, 13 March 2015, available at: www.newsweek.com/plea-action-gruesome-photos-smuggled-syria-display-un-313766; R. Jalabi, above note 65.

67 See Ian Black, “Syrian Regime Document Trove Shows Evidence of ‘Industrial Scale’ Killing of Detainees”, The Guardian, 21 January 2014, available at: www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/20/evidence-industrial-scale-killing-syria-war-crimes.

68 Ibid.

69 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2003, p. 122.

70 See Ben Hubbard and David D. Kirkpatrick, “Photo Archive Is Said to Show Widespread Torture in Syria”, New York Times, 21 January 2014, available at: www.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/world/middleeast/photo-archive-is-said-to-show-widespread-torture-in-syria.html.

71 Some six years later, the name “Caesar” was attached to the US National Defense Authorization Act of 2020, in the form of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, although this Act was not about intervening to change material conditions on the ground, but the pursuit of human rights abuses. The Act commits the US president to “submit[ting] to the appropriate congressional committees a list of foreign persons that the President determines are knowingly responsible for or complicit in serious human rights abuses committed against citizens of Syria or their family members, regardless of whether such abuses occurred in Syria”. See: https://tinyurl.com/35xq6eqj.

72 “The Crisis in Yemen: What You Need to Know”, New York Times, 21 April 2015, available at: www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/03/26/world/middleeast/yemen-crisis-explained.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer.

73 UN Human Rights, Situation of Human rights in Yemen, Including Violations and Abuses since September 2014: Report of the Group of Eminent International and Regional Experts as submitted to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Doc A/HRC/42/17, 9 August 2019, paras 97(b)–(c).

74 Robert F. Worth, “How the War in Yemen Became a Bloody Stalemate – and the Worst Humanitarian Crisis in the World”, New York Times, 31 October 2018, available at: www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/31/magazine/yemen-war-saudi-arabia.html.

75 “Yemen Could Be ‘Worst Famine in 100 Years’”, BBC News, 14 October 2018, available at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-45857729.

76 UNICEF, Yemen Country Office Humanitarian Situation Report, October 2020, available at: www.unicef.org/media/89831/file/Yemen-Humanitarian-SitRep-31-October-2020.pdf.

77 UNICEF, Yemen Five Years On: Children, Conflict and COVID-19, June 2020, available at: www.unicef.org/yemen/media/4281/file/Yemen%20five%20years%20on_REPORT.pdf.

78 WFP, “WFP Warns of Food Crisis in Yemen Amid Challenges in Reaching People and Shortage Of Funding”, 19 August 2015, available at: www.wfp.org/news/news-release/wfp-head-warns-growing-food-crisis-yemen-amid-challenges-reaching-people-and-short.

79 Karin Zeitvogel, “Compassion Fatigue Sets In as Yemen Spirals Out of Control”, Washington Diplomat, 30 September 2015, available at: https://washdiplomat.com/compassion-fatigue-sets-in-as-yemen-spirals-out-of-control/.

80 WFP, “Yemen”, available at: www.wfp.org/countries/yemen.

81 OCHA, “Yemen Situation Report”, available at: https://reports.unocha.org/en/country/yemen.

82 Gordon Brown, “We Can No Longer Just Stand By While Children Are Dying in War Zones”, The Guardian, 2 November 2018, available at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/02/children-dying-war-zones-targeted-impunity.

83 Kamal Al-Solaylee, “The Unspeakable Suffering in Yemen Has Barely Elicited More Than Collective Sighs on the Global Stage”, Globe and Mail, 22 June 2018, available at: www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-unspeakable-suffering-in-yemen-has-barely-elicited-more-than/.

84 Peter Salisbury, “Yemen's Looming Famine Has Been a Long Time Coming”, Washington Post, 5 December 2018, available at: www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/12/05/yemens-looming-famine-has-been-a-long-time-coming/?utm_term=.6929460263d2.

85 UN Security Council, The Situation in the Middle East, UN Doc S/PV.7795, 26 October 2016, p. 6.

86 Michael Kimmelman, “Berlin, 1945; Grozny, 2000; Aleppo, 2016”, New York Times, 14 October 2016, available at: www.nytimes.com/2016/10/15/world/middleeast/aleppo-destruction-drone-video.html.

87 Ibid.

88 Andrew Hoskins, “About the Project: Forgetting War”, available at: https://archivesofwar.gla.ac.uk/forgetting-war/about-the-project/.

89 Elle Hunt, “Boy in the Ambulance: Shocking Image Emerges of Syrian Child Pulled from Aleppo Rubble”, The Guardian, 18 August 2016, available at: www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/18/boy-in-the-ambulance-image-emerges-syrian-child-aleppo-rubble.

90 See the Missing Migrants website, available at: https://missingmigrants.iom.int/.

91 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, Zone Books, New York, 2008, p. 191.

92 Ibid.

93 David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, Simon & Schuster, London, 1996, p. 216.

94 David Rieff, interview with author, Glasgow, 6 March 2018.

95 Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2010, p. 46.

96 Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, “Humanitarian Catastrophe in Maarat Al Nouman, Syria; At Least 38 Dead, Hundreds Injured”, press release, 20 December 2019, available at: https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/humanitarian-catastrophe-maarat-al-nouman-syria-least-38-dead-hundreds.

97 Andrew Hoskins, “The Restless Past: An Introduction to Digital Memory and Media”, in A. Hoskins (ed.), Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, Routledge, New York, 2018, p. 2.