Annotation---Regarding the Pain of Others

Regarding the pain of others Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag frist started with the “difficulty of communication” about the question "How in your opinion are we to prevent war?"between Virginia Woolf and an eminent lawyer in London.Then Sontag analyze the relationship beween images and war,and the images could be perceived and understand accounding the difference between such factors as sex and cultureand status.

Sontag quote from Virginia Woolf again “No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.” In order to explain the role of “we” and “others”.“we” are the viewer of images, sympathizers, those only nominally concerned about some nasty war taking place in another country. “others” is the victims of the war who been ducumented into photographs.

The subjective and Objective of the image,( Cyberntic filters?)

Sontage believe war imagery is open to both interpretation and manipulation.Images could be used and reused,and also forged and manipulated by political or commercial purpose and the need of mass media.Images make events seem "real" to viewers, how ever the reality been covered by amount of “filters”. first filtered through image-takers, then selected and by media sometimes may be authorities，then present with different forms and format; news paper, television and network source.

Sontag also mention how technology and media provide more convenient way for people to receive high frequency of repetition of violence and war image. “In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people's pain. ” “For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.”

Key words

“we” and “others”

subjective and Objective

pain and entertainment

Reality and dreams

Cybernetic filters