Kate Hollett

Head of Class

Johanna Gunther

Resident of Love

Interns of Love

Simon

Feyzan

Linda

Egor

Theodora

Leonie

Judith

Matthias

Andrea

Erika

Michael

Corinna

Lisa-Christin

Madlen

Astrid

Severin

Ann-Kathrin

Jasmin

Janick

Sven

Pia

Jelena

Philipp

Lea

Torsten

Sonja

Sharing Love...

C.J. Zamarron

pic by:

Leuphana | Kate Hollett | I Love You Everywhere | Contact

Research Project - Altruism, Love, Ethics And The Media? -  Sven

Do you feel “love” when you see an advertisement by UNICEF? Is it altruism when we see someone standing on the street helplessly promoting Amnesty International with a few pictures and his voice?

Can we actually talk about social action, a moral value system or ethics if someone tries to attract attention for a “social issue” by advertising it commercially?

As I have spent part of my last year travelling and working in countries which we euphemistically  dubbed as “developing countries”, I am now wondering about our western culture trying to use certain images of countries in which need, necessity and the struggle of survival is an order of the day.
Can we actually make profit out of using the feeling of altruism or charity for promoting a product?

The question which captures most of my interest is whether people get engaged in help projects because of LOVE or whether the phenomena of so called altruism as we might even find it in excerpts of Aristotle’s virtue ethics or the Bible is just an illusion created by our western media culture in order to make US feel well.

My outline could be a critical examination on phenomena in the media which include the image of “help”, selflessness or social action as a means to promote a product or use it for marketing purposes.

It might be interesting to see whether the image of love, combined with a feeling of compassion is used in advertising spots or advertisements to create a certain feeling of charity or pitifulness which helps the advertiser to promote his product.

Of course, the question arises whether compassion could be seen as a form of love and whether people in general are able to control their feeling of compassion in a way.
So another moral question about the responsibility of the advertiser in general arises and whether (uncontrollable (?)) feelings should be used to attract people’s attention or to even delude their attention from a feeling to a product…

As you can see, I am about to focus on three main subjects in this context and am trying to give you an overall impression of my thoughts.

A short summary – to cut to the chase

1.Is it possible/ right/ morally correct to promote social action in a commercialized way?

2.Do people get involved into social/ help projects because of a feeling of inner “love” (in the sense of altruism or charity) or is the whole talk about charity only a form of reassuring one’s self in order to “feel good”?

3.Where do we misuse the feeling of love in order to sell a product?

Personally, I prefer the last point, because it actually shows us how much potential and possibilities the misuse of media has.
It is also a form of wake-up call for our “robot-like” business world and shows us that even human feelings can be treated as consumable durables.

Just to give you an idea on the cruelty (is it cruelty?) of the means which are used by the media:

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