The construction of meaning through emotion

Abstract

Being extensions of the human senses, the media exaggerate emotions and contribute to those becoming group experiences. We give ourselves to the other through the media, exposing our suffering and looking at other people’s pain. We seek this exteriorization of feelings as a way of evading from the real world, but also because feelings become real through socialization. The media’s simulation culture (Baudrillard, 1992) allows us to evade, which is a need and contributes to the concept of society as a reunion of emotions. We look for other people’s pain and this reality makes us see ourselves as equals, united by the inevitability of the human condition: death.

In this article we are going to look into health news published in November 2012 by the daily newspaper Jornal de Notícias and in which the common citizen or patient are news sources. This is the start for a debate on the construction of meaning through emotion, represented by the look over other people’s suffering.