Timothy Recuber

Theorizing the Web is such a great conference–good crowds, interesting people in attendance & presenting, fun atmosphere, and really smart work on display. And as it turns out a WaPo blogger attended my talk, and mentioned it in a piece about #Kony2012 and hashtag activism.

Incidentally, I don’t actually think that what I’ve called “infoguilt” is a completely new phenomenon, as it would seem from that blog post, but rather that the interactivity of digital media creates a new sort of moral problem when one is presented with news of distant suffering. The roots of this problem are as old as the Enlightenment, as Luc Boltanski has discussed–when confronted with the suffering of distant others who we cannot directly assist, we must at least speak out, or at least acknowledge the reality of others’ suffering, if only to ourselves. This has been the rough consensus about how to morally respond to distant suffering since well before the digital era, according to Boltanski anyway. My point was partly about how the norm of speaking out to oneself gets complicated by the ease of donating or liking or reblogging or signing a petition, etc. Couple with the ever increasing amount of information about suffering from all over the world we can now receive via Twitter, Facebook, etc., I think there is an emergent moral dilemma here, that merely acknowledging such suffering often feels insufficient, and the demands of such information about others’ suffering feel overwhelming.

Slides of the talk are here, and video is here, if you’re interested.