The Concept of Exposure to Images of Suffering - Essay Example

?Introduction Empathy is the ability to share grieves and sorrows with fellow human beings. Empathy is the act of experiencing inner emotional pain for other people who are going through a certain kind of suffering. Exposure to images of people suffering arouses emotional feeling that tend to identify with that particular suffering. Nevertheless, continuous exposure to these images develops a brutal condition whereby the ability of the spectators to be empathetic is exhausted. In this modern era, the media has flooded its outlets with images of warring countries, holocaust, hunger stricken people, devastated life through natural calamities, and violent crimes. This exposure has adapted the viewers to the atrocities making them to appear as normal. Nowadays, nothing seems a big deal the killings, death everywhere, hunger all appears as a constant reminder of the normal patterns of the world. The constant exposure to images of suffering brings about a condition known as empathy or compassion fatigue. This is a stage where a person develops numbness to the sufferings experienced by other human beings. This papers aims at affirming the idea that our exposure to images of suffering exhausts our capacity to empathize. The term pornography of violence refers or describes the marketing of atrocities whereby human beings are reduced to commodities. This is the exposure of helpless victims at their very worst moment of suffering, thus repeating their oppression all over again. For instance, exposing through a public media an African child naked and suffering from kwashiorkor a malnutrition condition, not only undignified the child by exposing his or her nakedness but also exposes the child suffering which as personal as personal human sexuality thus the term pornography. Pornography of violence exposes people’s misery, fears, grief, and their bodies in a very detailed manner that leaves no stone unturned. The media expose the world as if it were a naked body, displaying all the atrocities, pain, and suffering happening around the world without considering the effects of the image to the viewers. Everything that enters a human mind has a positive or a negative effect. Research depicts that visual images has a greater impact as compared to other modes of acquiring information. Gangster movies for example, have had a heavy toll on the youth. Most juveniles who are repeatedly exposed to violent movies gradually develop numbness to societal morals and find themselves behaving in unruly manner (Hufton 38). These youngsters get accustomed to violent condition to a point that they are not afraid The content revealed by the media today is much poisoned with negative images in the same criteria. From the onset of the worlds war II, images of war and terror never ceased from being displayed by the media. The more people got accustomed to those pictures, their ability to feel companionate faded with the increase of violent images display. The effect of viewing negative images are far so devastating in that so many atrocities have been committed by the mire fact that perpetrators have no empathy and compassion at all. The morals of the society are deteriorating day in day out; people are being involved in scandals ranging from mass killings, sexual immorality, first class murder crimes, and numerous transgressions. Negative images are being propelled through the media and no one seems to care. Taking the case of the Rwandan genocide, as the Hutus continued to kill more Tutsis leaving their maltreated bodies lying everywhere on streets the media did not hesitate to take shots of the images and they went ahead to broadcast them. The images were terrible and gruesome, people all over the world watched as poor victims of the genocide suffered terrible deaths (Keane 65). One thing I tend to believe is that, as the Hutus watched more bodies on streets and bushes, their ability to have compassion and empathy towards the Tutsi faded away this may be the reason why approximately one million Tutsi lost their lives. Negative images have also nurtured and propelled rampant moral degradation; this has been the cause of sex, violence, and transgression. Pornography for instance has totally undignified human body to an extent that it is viewed as an object of human pleasure (Dean 88). People no longer attach the due respect to human body as it was before. Cases of gang rape have increase tremendously; men do not respect women and they just take women as objects of sexual gravitation that are later left to die in anguish. Reports of domestic violence and relationship problems have elevated drastically, we have been fed with the wrong type of food and believed the incorrect type of information. The media have no consideration and do not even think twice on the effects of what they allow people to see (Liss 25). The media is only interested in making money but have no care about the major impact it has upon those viewing the images they broadcast. Carolyn Dean in her book, empathy, pornography, and suffering revisits the idea of how our exposure to violent images can affect our ability to be empathetic. She confirms that the public has turned numb on being empathetic. According to dean, this phenomenon is observed by humanitarian organizations that take the initiative of conducting fundraisings to help those faced by certain atrocities (Dean 90). The organizations claim that the public sensitivity to the suffering of others has drastically reduced and people have turned numb to empathy and compassion. As Dean explains, in the nineteenth century, some American abolitionist fighting for the rights of the abused and mistreated slaves tried to circulate the image portraits of the suffering slaves with an objective of arousing sympathetic actions (Moeller 56). Contrary to what they expected, the images often attracted the wrong kind of reactions. People took the images to satisfy their crude pleasures. According to Dean, for human compassion to be aroused there must exist a certain symbolic proximity between the sufferer and the one to be touched by the suffering (Dean 102). The strength of imagination to develop a close attachment to the sufferer was the one to inspire someone to have compassion to the sufferer rather than the images of the sufferer. The images could however induce some kind of insincere empathy or compassion. Dean puts it that the tears people cry for the people who are suffering are not pure and not sincere either. The actual ability of being empathetic has been eroded over time and people have lost touch with their feelings because their minds have been overfed with images of suffering until everything seems as normal (Dean 112). Taking the various historical holocaust accounts such as the bombing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mass killings of the Jews in the Nazis regime, Pornography of violence as depicted exposes the world so much that people tend to believe that the world is a rotten place full of war and atrocities. This brain picture is not correct. The media has made us to believe the hoax that by displaying the most sensitive part of human being thus suffering. I believe that there so many places in the world that experience tranquility and freedom but instead of the media trying to conceal the worst part of the world, they openly expose it with such a great intensity that numbs the sympathetic part of human beings. Nowadays, not until the sufferer is in close proximity to the would-be sympathizer, it would be a difficult task to convince the sympathizer by only providing the pictures displaying the suffering of the victim. The main question in Dean writing is whether there is a clear outline reference for suffering. Today’s media has developed into something we can call moral habituation, we are so much exposed to so much to a point that we do not even realize it and in seeing much we tend to feel less. We have been exposed to extreme suffering such that we cannot actually reference suffering to something. Pornography of violence have used by the media to show explicit images under tin the pretense of exposing violence. The media has exposed naked people at desperate situation or dead in fact in the pretense of showing to the public the impact of a certain disaster. Pornography of violence has led many astray through explicit images that portray people in their worst conditions in their lives. Many atrocities have been committed in the world since time immemorial and the images of terror have been broadcasted through the media. People got used to violence and pornographic images that the media shows and their minds have been drained off the ability to 0be compassionate. Conclusion The idea that our exposure to images of suffering exhausts our capacity to empathize has been clearly explained in the above paper. It has been established that our ability to sympathize becomes numb after being exposed to many images of suffering. Overexposure to images that depict people suffering has been termed as “pornography” meaning that it exposes something as personal as human sexuality, which is supposed to be delicately handled. The pornography of violence exposes atrocities that have adverse effects on the viewer. This has brooded acts of sexual immorality, violence, and transgression. Exhaustion of empathy is brought about by being over exposed to numerous images of suffering people in their worst condition and a clear reference cannot be drawn to quantify the worst experience of suffering that requires the emphatic feeling. Works Cited Dean, Carolyn. The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France. Berkeley: University of California, 2000. Print. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. Hufton, Olwen, ed. Historical Change and Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures. New York: Basic, 1995. Print. Keane, John. Reflections on Violence. London: Verso, 1996. Print. Liss, Andrea. Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Print. Moeller, Susan. Compassion Fatigue. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print. Dean, Carolyn. Empathy, pornography, and suffering. 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