Concluding Comment: Moral Responsibility and Civic Responsiveness: Spectacles of Suffering on Digital Media

Abstract

This special section brings together four original contributions on an emerging problematic around moral spectatorship—the problematic of when, how and to which effect citizens respond to mediated suffering on digital platforms. In my brief commentary, I draw on insights from these four contributions to reflect on two themes that emerge as central to this problematic: the conditions of possibility for digital moral spectatorship and the resources of reflexivity that constitute digital spectatorship as online action.

KEYWORDS:

• civic responsiveness
• mediated suffering
• affect
• digital
• solidarity

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lilie Chouliaraki

Lilie Chouliaraki (corresponding author) is Professor of Media and Communications and a Doctoral Programme Director in the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.