Mediatizing traumatic experience and the emotions

This chapter focuses on the ways traumatic experiences are depicted and triggered by the media of communication. It also accounts for the multiple modes through which emotions have been treated in media scholarship. It is argued that for the most part the mediatization of others’ traumas gives rise to ‘quasi-emotions’ which are part and parcel of the spectacularization of suffering; however, it is also argued that there is space for full-fledged emotions like sympathy and compassion for the victims, and anger, resentment, or disgust for the wrongdoers to give rise to supporting thereafter a ‘politics of pity’. This moral-emotional function of the media is feasible through the emergence of ‘moral universals’ despite widespread cynicism and apathy.

Psychoanalysis · Identity, Memory, and Therapy · Psychology