Reports of bombings tend to get huge numbers of mentions on social media, but that doesn’t always mean a similar level of news coverage.

Source: www.bbc.com

The short answer is obviously “Yes.”  Yet, this question brings up other questions about cultural empathy and how ‘connected’ we might feel to people of other places than our own global neighborhood.  This political cartoon-ish map

has more truth in it than we might like to admit; it is subtitled ‘How terrible it is the the Western world when a tragedy happens in…?’

 

Questions to Ponder: Does the ‘where’ influence if we perceive the event as a true tragedy or not (or maybe just the magnitude or importance of the tradegy)?  How come?  What does this say about us as inidividuals, society, and the media?  How can we teach our students in a way to foster more cultural empathy?

 

Tags:  social media, place, culture, political, terrorism, media.