The writer is Assistant Professor of History at LUMS, and Research Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. His book, Masculinity, Sexuality and Illegal Migration: Human Smuggling from Pakistan to Europe, has been published by Oxford University Press, Karachi, this year
In important respects, social media appears to be transforming the way people relate to the ‘pain of others’, to borrow a phrase from the title of Susan Sontag’s seminal collection of essays on the aesthetics and ethics of war photography. Today, we are better and more quickly informed about human suffering than we have been in the past; and we make sense of it collectively. An obvious question arising from this fact is whether we are better placed to feel empathy, and if so, does it allow us to formulate better-informed responses that feed back into the news cycle and exert pressure on reality?
The aftermath of the Paris attacks suggests media discourse and opinion is indeed formulated in a manner more broadly inclusive and responsive to bottom-up input from diverse locations than it has been in the past. As news of the violence spread virally, hashtags communicating the dimensions of its horror proliferated. Millions around the world processed its disturbing implications, scouring for thoughtful columns and blogs in search of answers to the difficult questions it poses. They did so not just as individuals or within national collectives, but in mini-public spheres spanning continents. These digital communities of concern, numerically bigger than individuals but smaller than national newspaper readerships, are facilitating global exchanges of information and opinion so extensive, one could be forgiven for thinking physical geography matters less than it once did.
Many have rightly complained that social media content reflects unequal relations of power, not least because much of it revolves around content published by news organisations that espouse the perspectives of the West. The very fact that the Paris attacks generated a global wave of online anxiety is reflective of racial hierarchies that shape dominant valuations of human life. By singling out a single atrocity of this sort for collective mourning, Facebook initially reproduced the narratives of large news organisations that classify acts of terrorist barbarism against Euro-American populations as having universal significance, thereby naturalising violence in and against ‘the darker nations’.
Nonetheless, the fact that these asymmetries have been highlighted, debated and taken on board by some news outlets following an outcry on social media suggests an advance from the Cold War when millions in the global South were killed in proxy wars with few channels for news and opinion from global peripheries to reach electorates in the countries that sponsored them. It also suggests progress, for that matter, from the days of the 1991 Iraq war, which, as French philosopher Jean Braudrillard famously claimed, “did not take place”. He was referring figuratively to an Orwellian campaign of propaganda by the US and its allies, which, lapped up by corporate media, prevented virtually any news of Iraqi deaths reaching the West.
A distinct, less well-aired set of issues concerns our broader relationship with information and technology. As we read about and gaze at images of political violence and tragedy as never before, we would do well to recall Susan Sontag’s scepticism about the limits of empathy when it comes to understanding the pain of others through media which seduces us into thinking what we feel is ‘authentic’ sentiment. The ephemeral nature of the web-based mourning over the past couple of weeks suggests sympathy for the victims of Paris was shallow; analysts have noted that ‘solidarity hashtags’ like the incongruously pious #PrayforParis trended for a few hours, disappearing from the ‘top 100’ trending topics within a day or so.
Social media platforms such as Facebook are part of an information-based economy that voraciously demands ever more of our time and emotional energies as ‘users’. Friends invite each other to click on and briefly think about issues of the moment; we do, but all too often, in a single techno-consumerist flash, scroll down, without deepening our investment. The net result is a brief and temporary increase in concern for a good deal of suffering that does not directly concern us, and a reduction in time for the material world of people and places that do.
No doubt some activists use social media to mobilise and organise off-line. Of those treating it as a tool with which to contest dominant narratives, however, few seem worried by the fact that this requires equal if not complete absorption in sensational news agendas dominated by stories about terrorism. Of the various interests currently profiting from the horrors of the Paris attacks, it is sobering to consider that Facebook was arguably second only to the Islamic State. The ‘safety application’ for Parisians who ‘survived’ is troubling not just for its privileged treatment of Europe, but its nourishment of a distortive perception of terrorism as the main danger facing humanity. Speculation on BBC World about a possible biological weapon trumped more concrete news of the objectively more dangerous prospect that antibiotics are becoming ineffective.
Scrolling through the bottomless comment on the implications of Paris (or for that matter Beirut), one senses an acute sense of drama and anxiety unrelated to the material suffering of those directly involved. In this echo chamber where individuals comment in order to accumulate ‘likes’ from ‘friends’ rather than grapple with and contest the agendas of powerbrokers, the pain of others all too easily becomes an occasion to demonstrate mastery of some subject to a small audience of politically likeminded colleagues and admirers — usually from the safety of a desk.
The terrifying reality of the events in Paris should never be underestimated. But it will only ever be known to those who were physically present, and those whose lives have been transformed by the loss of a loved one. When a tragedy of this sort occurs, perhaps the best thing we can do is sign out for a few hours. Not just out of respect for the victims, and not just to deprive terrorists of the publicity they so crave — both good reasons unto themselves. For all the obvious advances in our knowledge of political violence and the global nature of our reading communities, too much information and comment on the suffering of others threatens to anaesthetise us to their pain.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 29th, 2015.
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