Abstrakt
Contemporary popular culture is soaked with emotion. Any popular media content has to arouse emotion in order to succeed in the struggle for attention.
Much like war pornography – term that describes exploitation of explicit violent war imagery –, we can postulate the term emotional pornography. Contemporary media and journalism exploit private emotion, expose them for spectators to consume.
Emotion became the most important news value (using the term of Galtung and Ruge) or cognitive scheme, to put it differently. We can see a parallel with ‚actual‘ pornography, which grew from erotic allusions to full visual exposition of flesh.
There is no ‚veil‘ to cover shame, no ‚veil‘ to ignite desire, if we use Didi-Huberman’s imagery. There’s no desire, there’s only appetence to consume other’s private emotion.
Emotional pornography exposes emotion in full light, full sound, full narative background. Emotion are simplified to the state of basic narative gesture, similarly to the way sexual act is simplified in pornography.
In this way, we can expect some kind of ‚porn addiction‘ to became part of our culture.