Much thanks to new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), including high-speed internet, smart phones and a variety of social media platforms, the development challenges in faraway lands, social justice issues at home and the distant suffering of others is merely a hashtag away or a scroll through your social media feeds. In conjunction with the hegemony of the neoliberal market, and the discourse around human rights, this has resulted in new dynamics within a variety of fields, including humanitarian work, development, Communication for Development, journalism and activism.
For example, Shringarpure (2020) argues that this has resulted in new forms of ‘humanitarian’ activities and work, namely what is referred to as ‘Digital Humanitarianism’ (Shringarpure, 2020) or ‘Everyday Humanitarianism‘ (Richey, 2018) – i.e. that humanitarian actions now include taking part in daily online activities, such as signing online petitions, donating, liking, tweeting and sharing links and articles in relation to any humanitarian crisis. Shringarpure argues that this does not only reinforce the distance between those suffering and those ‘helping’ from far away, but that it also perpetuates and reinforces the unequal power relations between those that are ‘saviours’ and those that need to be ‘saved’. In addition, Chouliaraki argues that there has been a “fundamental shift in the public consciousness towards a more individualized discourse [that] ‘explicitly situates the pleasures of the self at the heart of moral action’”. Richey argues that this is evident in the practice of ‘Everyday Humanitarianism’ as those minor actions are often meant to contribute to personal (self-)gratification. This shift is interesting on many levels, so in this blog series I will primarily focus on the major components and the logic of ‘digital/everyday humanitarianism’, the concept of ‘Digital Saviour Complex’, and the age of ‘post-humanitarianism‘.
Coined by Shringarpure (2020), the concept of ‘Digital Saviour Complex’ is an updated and digital version of the so called ‘White Saviour Industrial Complex’ through which privileged saviours simultaneously mix “charity with profit” in order to validate existing privileges and “fulfil their sentimentalist narcissism” (Shringarpure, 2020, pp.184-185). This thinking is very much related to what Chouliaraki terms ‘post-humanitarianism’, which is a “form of humanitarian solidarity predicated upon converging logics of consumption and utilitarianism and has thus become less about “others” and more about “us.” (Richey, 2018, p.629). If development actors, activists, journalists, and humanitarian actors fail to recognize and critically reflect on their privileges and the power relations which underpin their interventions, there is a real risk that they become ‘digital saviours’ in this era of ‘post-humanitarianism’ – failing to recognize how their communication and digital practices perpetuate unequal power relations, reinforce stereotypes and negative imagery, and focusing primarily on profit and self-gratification – ultimately doing more harm than good.
In this blog series, I will critically examine how a well-established news organization in Sweden and one of their free-lance journalists appear to have abandoned journalism ethics and standards when reporting on a case of a 12-year old missing girl and her family situation, fuelled by the logic of the ‘Digital Saviour Complex’ and the related self-gratification that helps underpin ‘‘post-humanitarianism’. More on this in my next blog post.
References:
- Richey, L.A. (2018). Conceptualizing “Everyday Humanitarianism”: Ethics, Affects, and Practices of Contemporary Global Helping, New Political Science, 40:4, 625-639
- Shringarpure, B. (2020). Africa and the Digital Savior Complex. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 32:2, 178-194.
