Polina Povarich, intern at UNODC Co-financing and Partnership Section, Vienna
It seems nowadays, that humanity is attracted to the negative aspects in life. Sadness, unhappiness, pain, war – those topics have been in light of human culture since the dawn of thought. Just remember the passages of Homer's Iliad about the blood-lusty Ares, flying happily over the Trojan battlefields full of injured and dying soldiers. Human tragedy has always attracted thinkers, philosophers and writers, from Buddha to Sartre. However, only recently within the past century, this cultural mass production has become an object of popular taste. Cultural industries love shocking audiences, along with sensation-driven mass media became a basis of an interesting phenomenon: the artificial creation of emotions, which fill the lives of viewers with excitement – frequent yet shallow.
Wars, murders, catastrophes and natural disasters compose the topical range not only of broadcasting network news, but popular culture per se. Poverty is among these themes. Being a burning issue of humanity, one of the problems the solution to which is marked as 'urgent' on the world agenda, it became a source of inspiration for modern mass culture. But where does it come from? Is it the awareness of global problems? The audiences' desire for sensation? Or humanity's hidden quest for self-destruction? The roots of this phenomenon, as of so many others, can be found in the history of the previous century with its destruction, wars and revolutions, in the ragged visuals of expressionism, and in many other schools of thought.
Along the course of the 20th century the concept of poverty has been raised in human cultural consciousness in a variety of ways. One of them is “hipsters” – an American subculture of the 1940s which was drawing on the lifestyle and visuals of poverty. The junkies were mostly Caucasian youths from rather well-off families, who went to university, were well educated, but used to dress, talk and behave like the dwellers of ghetto quarters. They intently adopted subverted social roles as a response to and protest against the social situation and exclusion of certain social groups. The hipster of today is a different type – Hollywood breed, no longer driven by the expression of a strong social position. In mid-century, Charles Bukowsky made the so-called low life of the beat and hippie 1960s a hit. Grunge became the 1990s adept of poverty visuals by popular taste with its worn-out sweaters, dirty hair and ultra-skinny models. Today these waif-like girls invade the glossy pages of the magazines, setting beauty standards at the skinniness levels achievable only by those who actually do not have the money for food. Or want to fit in those garments really, really badly.
The irony is that in our post-postmodern age of utter relativism it is at times hard to see what is right and real, just as Lily Allen's song goes. Additionally media attention, by virtue of the infamous good intentions effect, does not help much either, with the global problem of poverty often becoming yet another forgettable news headline. A photo of a starved African kid, usually taken with a wide-angle camera, the child peering with large and hungry eyes right at the viewer, so striking at first, by now became a cliché of pseudo-documentary photography and an easy way to come across as “concerned with global issues”. This concern is well exploited by celebrities, among whom a trend is developing of travelling the world with UN missions or by themselves to help raise the concern of common people to poverty issues. Images of Angelina Jolie strolling Asian villages, or Madonna adopting a child from Malawi are multiplied by the thousands in the mass media. It may be all well and good, but frankly speaking, it often seems rather fake.
And here is the question of the modern media effect in relation to poverty: Does it really strike the chord and hit the strings of people's souls? Or did poverty become one of those back-up stories which are kind of there, but aren't so interesting anymore, the been-there-seen-that sort of thing? And what do we do about it? I cannot help but think: would it not be awesome to use the pop-cultural attention-generating fund to make people actually think, and not glamorise the issue as it tends to now? A great example is Ewan McGregor’s motorcycle trip series, showing in an unobtrusive and interesting way true lives of real people. To me, its emotional impact is just this much stronger than the figures and shocking shots of the news channels.
All in all, what imports is not just what we do about poverty issues, but also how they are presented to us.
It seems nowadays, that humanity is attracted to the negative aspects in life. Sadness, unhappiness, pain, war – those topics have been in light of human culture since the dawn of thought. Just remember the passages of Homer's Iliad about the blood-lusty Ares, flying happily over the Trojan battlefields full of injured and dying soldiers. Human tragedy has always attracted thinkers, philosophers and writers, from Buddha to Sartre. However, only recently within the past century, this cultural mass production has become an object of popular taste. Cultural industries love shocking audiences, along with sensation-driven mass media became a basis of an interesting phenomenon: the artificial creation of emotions, which fill the lives of viewers with excitement – frequent yet shallow.
Wars, murders, catastrophes and natural disasters compose the topical range not only of broadcasting network news, but popular culture per se. Poverty is among these themes. Being a burning issue of humanity, one of the problems the solution to which is marked as 'urgent' on the world agenda, it became a source of inspiration for modern mass culture. But where does it come from? Is it the awareness of global problems? The audiences' desire for sensation? Or humanity's hidden quest for self-destruction? The roots of this phenomenon, as of so many others, can be found in the history of the previous century with its destruction, wars and revolutions, in the ragged visuals of expressionism, and in many other schools of thought.
Along the course of the 20th century the concept of poverty has been raised in human cultural consciousness in a variety of ways. One of them is “hipsters” – an American subculture of the 1940s which was drawing on the lifestyle and visuals of poverty. The junkies were mostly Caucasian youths from rather well-off families, who went to university, were well educated, but used to dress, talk and behave like the dwellers of ghetto quarters. They intently adopted subverted social roles as a response to and protest against the social situation and exclusion of certain social groups. The hipster of today is a different type – Hollywood breed, no longer driven by the expression of a strong social position. In mid-century, Charles Bukowsky made the so-called low life of the beat and hippie 1960s a hit. Grunge became the 1990s adept of poverty visuals by popular taste with its worn-out sweaters, dirty hair and ultra-skinny models. Today these waif-like girls invade the glossy pages of the magazines, setting beauty standards at the skinniness levels achievable only by those who actually do not have the money for food. Or want to fit in those garments really, really badly.
The irony is that in our post-postmodern age of utter relativism it is at times hard to see what is right and real, just as Lily Allen's song goes. Additionally media attention, by virtue of the infamous good intentions effect, does not help much either, with the global problem of poverty often becoming yet another forgettable news headline. A photo of a starved African kid, usually taken with a wide-angle camera, the child peering with large and hungry eyes right at the viewer, so striking at first, by now became a cliché of pseudo-documentary photography and an easy way to come across as “concerned with global issues”. This concern is well exploited by celebrities, among whom a trend is developing of travelling the world with UN missions or by themselves to help raise the concern of common people to poverty issues. Images of Angelina Jolie strolling Asian villages, or Madonna adopting a child from Malawi are multiplied by the thousands in the mass media. It may be all well and good, but frankly speaking, it often seems rather fake.
And here is the question of the modern media effect in relation to poverty: Does it really strike the chord and hit the strings of people's souls? Or did poverty become one of those back-up stories which are kind of there, but aren't so interesting anymore, the been-there-seen-that sort of thing? And what do we do about it? I cannot help but think: would it not be awesome to use the pop-cultural attention-generating fund to make people actually think, and not glamorise the issue as it tends to now? A great example is Ewan McGregor’s motorcycle trip series, showing in an unobtrusive and interesting way true lives of real people. To me, its emotional impact is just this much stronger than the figures and shocking shots of the news channels.
All in all, what imports is not just what we do about poverty issues, but also how they are presented to us.
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