Scrolling Past the Dead

[Jamal]

@Dawnstorm

Maybe let me put it this way: when you’re watching a death video, you’re not actually being distanced from the death. If it weren’t for that video that particular death probably wouldn’t ever have entered your awareness horizon. It’s more a question of how we deal with stuff that’s distant to begin with and wouldn’t be part of our world to begin with. When you’re talking about “distancing” here, you’re to some degree imagining you were “there”. Technologically mediated presence as “distancing” when it’s actually bridging distance. The question then is: What comes through? And who contributes what via their imagination.

If you don’t mind, I’ll just concentrate on this, because I think it’s the heart of your post. Answering it will help me get things clear.

The video and the feed do not distance the viewer from a death they might have witnessed in close proximity. But what is relevant is that the interaction lacks the character of an encounter with a suffering Other, despite having the structure of one. There is a person on one end, and a person suffering on the other—yet it does not elicit a moral response. This gap—social and ethical, not merely spatial—is what I’m calling “distancing.”

More simply put, the face in social media loses its moral demand—witnessing suffering becomes morally neutral. I think that’s significant.

@Dawnstorm

So: what’s the realtionship between a face-dominated morality, and an expanded-world rational morality?

The latter is secondary and derivative, and can become unmoored from the former.

@Dawnstorm

Presumably, they were real. And presumably nobody asked their permission to be a global stand in for a poor starving child.

Yes, and this is precisely why the responses of many people are subdued. But some people do respond, and when that happens I take it to be the effect of a pre-societal Levinasian moral response to the children perceived in their individuality, translated into expanded-world rational morality.