The Way We Live (and Die) Now

These past two days have made it ever so much more apparent that our social lives on the web are intractable, crucial, and part of the news and the historical record.

But also that cablenews journalists use what’s available given their short lead-time, and online sources equal informed searching from an office, rather than shoe-leather work. I’d say ‘really fucking lazy’, but that’s a bit unfair.

But I thought Alessandra Stanley’s piece in the NYT was on the mark:

The amazing thing is how familiar campus shootings have become. For viewers, initial disbelief is quickly folded into a methodical ritual of breaking bad news. News trucks race to the scene, witnesses upload images recorded on cellphones and video cameras, students on the scene calmly and patiently recount their impressions in front of news cameras. One student was taped soberly expressing shock — and cognizance. “This is like a college Columbine,” he said on MSNBC. “Really sad.”

“it’s clear now that rapid coverage is essential, and that anything not interactive would be useless.”

I either don’t understand what this means, in terms of referents, needs, desires, or else I do understand and couldn’t disagree more. Rapid coverage is necessary for what aside from satisfying ubiquitous human voyeurism? Interactive makes sketchy information useful how? I’m not saying I don’t have sympathy for the curiosity that apparently drives the reporting of these events, but I think one would be credulous to put much stock in easily obtained unverifiable bits of information as decribed. It looks to me like a pretty good description of an urban legend factory.

I spent a good half hour . . . filled with sickness unto death.

Congratulations on your speedy recovery.

And by the way, let us meet socially and you can call me a callous prick to my face.

Tom Bach,

Oh that’s absolutely correct. Instapundit wasn’t horrified at the event and grasping for solutions, he was callously promoting his pet projects. Absolutely, everyone who has a different solution than you who wasn’t piously weeping in the corner, is just a scumbag.

Me, I think all those people advancing their pet projects of more gun control and higher levels of security, instead of piously weeping in the corner, are also scumbags.

—-

On a more on point note, I was also blown away by the web aspect of the event. While bawling my eyes out over the 77 year old who survived the fucking nazis only to die (a hero) by some punk loser, I noticed that truth and fiction were being hammered out by average joes on Wikipedia, that the school paper had turned into a real time blog of events, and that there were many sites aggregating information, and that watching the news meant I was learning things slower and filtered through Stupid.

Tom Bach and KM — I think I take the side in this that those who “misinformed their reading public” were more likely to be in old media venues. Certainly I saw that those of us who followed developments online were a couple of steps ahead of tv-viewers in getting corrections. Although I agree with Tom as well that the net was a good way to promote “extermism” (you mean the dogma of extermination? Never heard that neologism, but like it) as a response.

Tom, I’m sorry that it turns out the ‘net’s a dangerous place to confess that you responded like a human being. Read Aaron T. Beck’s Prisoners of Hate for an analysis of your critics’ mentalities.

I have a pet project too: blame it all on the pace of modern life. Killing happens much more quickly now. So much more quickly that media (let alone people) can’t keep up. But reporting is also much faster, as are asinine, callous appeals to partisan agendas: people are cruel much faster now too.

Is your response ready yet? Everything is faster, bigger, better now.

Bad Jim,

It seems there might be something interesting in your post, but I don’t see it. Could you elaborate? Because I’m left floundering with your interpretation of the massacre was to try to be more careful in your life, because life is inherently woefully precarious and seatbelts are the low hanging fruit of mitigation. That the news wasn’t really that bad when put in an Iraqi context. And that YouTube makes you want to start a revolution to protect your culture from Katie Curic and millions of YouTube’ing teenagers. Was that even close?

You could read and view, but not interact in any meaningful sense. The blogosphere—at least the sites I read—were mostly silent about the events.

Where on other sites that you don’t read, posters from within the campus itself, including at least one person that shared a couple of courses with the killer were posting while people were still being killed, and soon after put up some of the guys recent english essays before he was identified for sure by anyone. Very weird to read stuff like that from thousands of miles away.

Of course all of this stuff is done outside of news channels, and is insanely fast and completely unchecked and speculative (and it’s as easy for rubbish to be picked up as truth). It will be interesting if the existing news networks will react to this by taking more risks to try to compete on speed, or realise they can’t win and reverse go back to being authoritative rather than first for each news story.

Thanks Scott, for the link, and to everyone for their comments. If I’m to add anything, it’s to say that I as much implied that the media culling information from the web made the events “real” in the sense that they were represented to the world on the terms set up by social web users- but also in recognizing social web use as documentary.

Unchecked crisis-time sources are nothing new. Talk radio? I’m ridiculously aware of the fatuousness of user-generated content: I spend my days trying to teach information literacy to college students. But even in the media outlets “of record”, i.e. the Times (and their “The Victims” feature), they’ve attempted some sense of authenticity through interaction.

And the disparity in coverage and emotive outpouring between the events at Virginia Tech and those of the war aren’t lost on me, especially as I watched the “Writing the Wartime Experience” segment of America at a Crossroads Monday night.

Steve Labonne-
“How does up-to-the-minute “coverage” of a horrible, but essentially random and meaningless, event make people better informed?”
Not better informed. More satisfied. Because they get to participate in it. Which is what they’ve always wanted, to go there, be there, stand right next to the grieving and watch the body bags come out of the building.
Four large bombs exploded across Baghdad on Wednesday, killing at least 127 people and wounding…

Tom Bach,

You are absolutely wrong in which sense I meant “pious”. You grief was obvious. My point was that your only acceptable response was grief. And anyone who presented a possible solution didn’t really care about the deaths, which is an extremely uncharitable interpretation.

But I’m sure you are a smart, interesting fellow when you aren’t angry at the stupidity of it all. Although, I expect you’ll be angry for a long time.

“Faster, bigger, better” I am so grateful for this discussion and I object to the commodification of grief. I am not a product to drive “news content”. Breathless live shots are interrupted by commercials followed by Brit Hume. All Nazi all the time.
Those students who say “It was almost like you had to fight for your life.” are like, the killer’s roomate who had to listen to Seung play the same repeated Collective Soul song HUNDREDS of times at full volume, but wouldn’t ask him to turn it down because “we didn’t have that kind of relationship. It would have made me uncomfortable.” This stupid young man was not able to adequately respond as a human being to a clearly deranged individual that he was living with in a college dorm room. Obviously, a lot of other “adults” dropped the ball as well.

“so it goes”

Tom Bach,
Thanks for pointing out the post by Debbie Schlussel (comment #2). She has since deleted her original comments, and replaced them with a one-liner. I don’t think that one-liner can be meaningfully considered as some sort of apology for her usage of the ethnic slur ‘Paki’ or for the rest of the post. You can take a look (if you must) at some of what she said in her original post under the post on the Sepia Mutiny blog linked here.

I suppose we cannot assume that new media will nescessarily approach topics such as these with the sensitivity they deserve or indeed even with responsibility. As we look at the way new-media is interpreting these events, I would like to observe that what gave old media a “voice” in the first place were credibility, responsibility and accountability. These do take time and effort to build.

Sorry for the double comment. I forgot to add the links in my previous comment. Here is a link to what remains of the original post and one to the post on Sepia Mutiny extracting from Schlussel’s original post.

What remains of the original post :
I’ve removed this entry, mostly because I am spending too much time monitoring the slimy comments from the Nazi-infested Media Matters for America cretins.

Ironically, ‘Pak’ means ‘pure’. Hence Pakistan, land of the pure. Paki should be worn with pride and not just out of spite.