Image abundance paradoxically makes distant injustices feel less real.

Evidence

Bottici proposes a theory of imaginal politics to describe how global injustice (framed as human-rights violations) becomes a spectacle, reproduced by an abundance of virtual images on our computer screens that raises our incredulity, with the paradoxical effect of rendering them more distant rather than closer to us. This works in concert with the financialization of formerly trustworthy liberal institutions such as news media and universities, as (ill-placed) trust in those former bastions of truth continues to decay. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 197

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that visual overexposure breeds incredulity rather than empathy is worth chasing against skeptical counterexamples (e.g. wartime imagery that did mobilize action).
• XREF: connects to: The gap between subjects’ investment and viewers’ indifference gives old photos their melancholy charge. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 361