同情的距离:远近的苦难、关爱与社交媒体时代的伦理人类学

The Distance of Sympathy:far and near Sufferings,Care,and the Ethic Anthropology in the Age of Social Media

数字技术驱动下的社交媒体,由于其连接性而在一定程度上实现了灾难信息的全球化。然而,同类的众多重大事件信息的送达,并不一定会在某个具体的个体或者群体中获得同样的响应,甚至可能完全不会得到响应。这意味着虽然信息的“普遍主义”在一定程度上已经实现,但早期深入人心的普遍主义伦理及其后续的各种变体却对此无能为力。从实存哲学的角度重新审视关爱和情感的实践可能已经部分成为一种学界共识,从这种角度出发,可以得到对当下社交媒体时代一种剥去规范性道德优越感之后、更为实践导向的“道德”构建的考量。这种状况对于人类学的伦理研究来说,可能更多意味着一种机遇,而不是挑战。

The globalization of disaster information has,to a certain extent,been achieved due to the general connectivity of social media driven by digital technology.However,the receipt of information of different traumatic events of a specific kind will not necessarily lead to identical responses from an specific individual or group,or even will not incur any feedback at all.This may imply that although the“universalism”of information has been realized to a certain extent,the once popular ethics of early universalist sympathy and its subsequent variants are powerless.Combining the insights emerged from the in-depth debates on care and indifference,unfamiliarity and intimacy,universalism and existential experiences in moral geography,ethical anthropology,and media studies after the“ethnic turn”,this article proposes that the universalist ethics of care may have encountered great challenges in everyday life,and that to reexamine care and affection from the perspective of existential ethics may have partly become a consensus.From this perspective,a more praxis-oriented“moral”construction of the current social media era may emerge,when the normative moral superiority has been stripped off.