The “ultimate empathy machine” as technocratic solutionism? Audience reception of the distant refugee crisis through virtual reality

Audiences of distant suffering in authoritarian regimes: Denial mechanisms and acts of moral justification

“…The study compels us to identify commonalities and differences within existing findings about audience engagement across different media systems, especially given the acute differences between the authoritarian media system and the Western media systems of the developed capitalist democracies. For example, compared to participants in Western audience studies (Seu, 2016), we found that while Chinese participants adopted different sociocultural scripts that constitute communitarianism and post-humanitarianism, they uniformly maintained a clear but highly problematic negative/positive dichotomy between themselves and mediated sufferers (see also Xu and Zhang, 2022). Future scholars are thus encouraged to de-homogenise the research agenda so that contextual and systematic differences are untangled from wider commonalities, such as media trust.…”

“…These empirical studies have predominantly studied audiences’ reactions to and interpretations of mediated suffering through the news (Huiberts and Joye, 2019; Kyriakidou, 2017; Scott, 2014; Weikmann and Powell, 2019), and, less often, through PR materials distributed by humanitarian campaigns and development mediators (Seu, 2016; Seu and Orgad, 2017). Given the proliferation of modern technology in the contemporary polymedia milieu, and with the emergence of algorithmically infused platform societies (Van Dijck et al, 2018), a thin but growing body of studies has investigated audience engagement with humanitarian communication through online campaigns and novel medium such as virtual reality (Xu and Zhang, 2022).…”