Media, enframing, revealing

I’d like to discuss the role of the media in conjunction with Heidegger’s text.

Black briefly describes the thousands of Jews expelled into the no-man’s land between border crossings. She writes, “The agony of these ditch people became an on-going spectacle for the world’s media” (158). I’ve seen some footage taken from concentration camps in the days after the end of the war, and the idea of similar imagery being broadcast on TV and consumed as spectacle presents the violent power of technology. Television images and newspaper photographs literally ‘enframe’ or circumscribe their subjects. If, as Heidegger writes“[w]ith the bounds the thing does not stop,” but “rather, from within them it begins to be what after production it will be,” (291) then those depicted in the media as a spectacle of suffering can no longer be approached as otherwise.

Heidegger writes, “Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take pace, where al­etheia, truth, happens.” The media ‘reveals’ the truth of Jewishness—of living not only in inhuman conditions, but also of existing in a visual suffering rather than a real and embodied suffering . This is, again, a question of the particular stakes of visuality.

What happens when people are 'revealed'? How do we approach people without the violence of modern technology--HeLa cells, eugenics, census reports, consumable spectacle?