Quick question: have you seen a charity fundraising advertisement? Typical charity drives will show various images of misery – terminally ill patients, endangered animals, children in war zones – all while imploring the audiences to donate to the charity organization, insisting that it is offering a chance for the audiences to help out the causes. Similar things happen in PSAs and media designed to “raise awareness” about issues, where the images of misery is brought up. Here, look at the life of an abused man with disablities. Here, look at protestors being beaten up!

Pretty much the opposite of romanticization of hardship and suffering, these advertisement and media milk them for all its worth.

Most people assume that depictions of sufferings would naturally invoke our sense of sympathy/empathy, but that is not exactly always natural or universal.

Through Roland Barthes’ study into Mythologies, Barthes describes a Myth as a set of signifiers (in our case, imagery of misery) embedded with a specific, implied connotation as the signified beyond the superficial meaning. To the audience, the connotation would seem natural to the imagery it is attached to. The picture of an emancipated, starving child in Africa means just that, but seen through a Myth, it carries additional implications: that the Africa continent has a food shortage and poverty problems. Its problems also mean it is somehow less advanced than other continents that could feed their people just fine.

In study of narrative empathy, the image of misery in an ad campaign or a PSA utilizes broadcast strategic empathy that calls upon every person’s innate sense of vulnerabilities to invoke empathy within the audience. For example, we could say that sufferings like deprivation of freedom and safety play to our own fears of the same thing happening to us, hence invoking empathy.

Further, these imageries are being used to exploit people’s sense of empathy into a capitalistic system of trade, where empathy becomes a commodity. Through Marxist thinking, in morality-driven society, this commodity is further fetishized as desirable beyond the mere value of empathy itself too. The goal of an ad campaign is to get its audiences to donate, but “donate” might not be an accurate way to describe it. because it is difficult to convince people to give something for nothing.

The theory is, by showing imageries of misery, the charity organization offers the empathy-invoking properties (embedded as myth) in the imageries in exchange for the audience’s emotional investment (read: empathy) in the shown misery. The imagery will then create negative feelings like pity, guilt, or anger in the audiences.

At this point the ad campaign/media offers its second deal: offering to convert those negative feelings into a good feeling of altruism for modest donation. Cynical interpretation substitutes feeling of altruism with feeling of power and superiority, since said donation theoretically contributes to the wellbeing of those people/animals in the picture.

Sometimes instead of money, a piece of media could offer to trade the negative feelings for loyalty to an ideology. A haunting image of protestors being beaten by the police could be used to offer to trade the outrage of the senseless violence for an anti-police agenda.

However, this transaction is not always successful though, as some people do not react as intended due to a lack of empathy or other factors. Imagery of misery has a varying effect on the audiences. Two pieces of media depicting the same tragedy could have different values of emotional appeal. From this, every single piece of imagery could be said to exist in a capitalistic market system, vying to buy the product of the audience’s empathy with the emotional appeal they have.

In short, our sense of empathy is essentially a commodity, constantly being up for sale to the various pieces of media like charity fundraising advertisement, who in turn offer us emotional fulfillment in exchange for their own agenda. To do this the media resorts to embedding empathy-invoking connotation in media depictions.