Slashdot Mirror
Feature: Technology, Media and Grief
Technology is a growing source of concern in the world because it changes in itself, and because its development generates other kinds of changes, many of them unforeseen.
The cover of the death of John Kennedy Jr. and his wife and sister-in-laws offers a vivid, contemporary look at how technology is affecting - sometimes overwhelming -- modern media.
Powerful and manipulative images - John Kennedy Jr. saluting his dead father's casket, nostalgic accounts of the Lost Camelot, images of weeping relatives, neighbors, friends and strangers, debris floating in water - are being transmitted technologically all over the United States and the world, repeated over and over again for hours, days, even when there is no new information to pass along.
As happened after the death of Diana Spencer, this grief becomes ritualized and globalized. It develops momentum of its own. People thousands of miles away - strangers who couldn't possibly have any first-hand knowledge of the principals in a far-off tragedy like this -are affected as grievously as family and friends.
For Americans these images are overwhelming, inescapable. They distort reality, crowd out other news and information and become so potent that become the locus of the country's civic business, the object of attention from public officials all the way up to the President.
When stories involve tragedies that happen to glamorous people - especially nice and attractive ones - technology transforms them into mythic, almost religious figures - Princess Di, and now, John Kennedy, Jr. They quickly becomes subjects not of journalism but adoration, their homes shrines, shrouded in flowers and testimonials. For different sorts of celebrities, however powerful - the controversial Mother Teresa comes to mind -- attention paid their passing is fleeting.
In recent decades, major stories like this have increasingly become driven by new technologies, especially the new genre of stories one could call Techno-Tragedies: the crash of TWA Flight 800, the OJ Simpson trial, the death of Princess Di, the war in Kosovo.
Thanks to satellite and digital advances, distant stories are no longer related to us by remote correspondents describing things we can't see for ourselves in places we can't go. Increasingly, journalists are referees presenting conflicting points-of-view, or simply narrators of images we are all seeing simultaneously, most frequently on TV, increasingly on the Net.
Techno-tragedies are driven by images rather than judgement, significance, reasoning or content.
Thus they frequently involve either celebrities or war. You will never see round-the-clock coverage on cable of famine in Africa or the declining quality of America's public schools. This kind of fusion coverage is reserved almost exclusively for potent techno-memes - people whose images warrant being fired all over the world at astonishing speed with numbing frequency.
War and tragedies involving the famous are perfect fuel for technologically - driven media. They offer riveting, addictive images. These images can distort reality. War is presented as bloodless and precise.
Nuance is nearly impossible. Diana Spencer, a humanistic celebrity, becomes a Saint. John Kennedy Jr. an affable magazine publisher, becomes the symbol of his generation, his tragedy a generational benchmark. Stories like Kennedy's plane crash are covered beyond all proportion or their natural place in news and history.
The power of technology seems to cause us to lose our moral bearings. There is no middle ground or civilized discourse, hardly any place to go to consider the impact of technology or the images it's bringing us in thoughtful, reasoned ways.
The tragic is confused with the historic. To be famous is to be heroic, to be earnest is to be noble.
"The news that John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and Lauren Besette are missing at sea and presumed dead has struck such a crippling blow for my generation," wrote Douglas Brinkley, a contributing editor of Kennedy's George Magazine and a history professor at the University of New Orleans, in the New York Times Monday. "?it's hard to escape the pang of disbelief, the empty feeling that a magical friend has gone away."
On CNN, a friend of the Kennedy family said on Tuesday that Kennedy "was the icon, the moral leader for the next generation of young Americans." This theme was repeated throughout the weekend, on TV, in newspapers, and on discussion groups on the Web. On MSNBC, Kennedy was described as "the flower of his generation, the inspiration for young America."
As the family friends and admirers spoke, images of young Kennedy playing in the White House, saluting his dead father, being surrounded with paparazzi, walking bare-chested at Brown University, were broadcast on the screen over and over again, all over the world. So were eerie pictures of helicopters and boats searching and searching, relatives grieving and ravaged.
Many of these images were visceral, highly charged, all playing to sadness and sympathy, all choreographed visually to underscore pathos and import, to unnerve and disconcert.
In a media fusion event like this one, they are repeated countless thousands of times over days. The same impulses exist on the Net, and Web, of course, they the imagery is missing, thus the impact muted. Even the so-called "serious" media got into the mythology business, speculating about family curses and the always mythical "Camelot."
"It's like John Kennedy being assassinated all over again," wrote a Chicago woman in an AOL chat room devoted to the plane crash all weekend. "A black shroud has come over all of us."
This quasi-hysterical media rhetoric underlies the humility and unpretentiousness of John Kennedy Jr.?s own life.
He deliberately decided to forego a life of moral leadership and public service. He was, from most accounts, a decent, likeable Manhattan media fixture, a publisher of a slick, glossy, not-in-any-sense great magazine that focused in equal parts on politics and Hollywood.
What his death underscores is that technology -- always an engine of social change -- is radically reshaping, even replacing journalism, becoming an engine of change in and of itself. In stories like this, technology eradicates the core function of journalism - clear-headed truth telling and grounded perspective.
Few places in the developing world are free from this kind of bombardment. A wire service reported that Scandinavian, German, and British newspapers were running as many pages on the plane crash as The Boston Globe was.
Websites also attract fans, mourners, admirers, fueling the individual grief from yet another direction. From Friday on, the message boards at Msnbc, Abcnews.com and Cnn.com have been overwhelmed by outpourings of mourning and admiration.
As with Princess Diana, the tone is often worshipful, especially over time, and as these images are repeated, a process almost akin to religious fervor. This isn't surprising. The tragic figure is no longer a human being with strengths and weaknesses, but increasingly like God himself, unfailingly noble, generous and decent.
This is a problem on many levels. One is that the evolution of this kind of media is tailor-made for some glamorous demagogue to come along and be instantly and globally martyred. So far, at least, we've been fortunate that these techno-tragedies have centered on people who seem benign, even good-hearted. Perhaps that isn't accidental.
Another is that the modern techno media -- increasingly owned by greedy, giant corporations -- has naked conflicts of interest to deal with when it comes to making editorial decisions about the stories they choose to cover so massively. Is the death of John Kennedy Jr., his wife and sister-in-law really the most important story in the world for five days now? This myopia is an increasingly toxic side effect of all encompassing techno-dramas.
Domestic civic discussions and issues came to a virtual halt during the year-long OJ Simpson affair. And after a year of being relentlessly bombarded by a techno-scandal, the Monica Lewinsky story, Americans were stunned to wake up and discover the Balkans at war, and us going with them. So technology becomes a potent social force as well as an agent of change.
Media executives rarely make editorial judgements for the public good. On cable news channels, tragedy - especially tragedy involving celebrity - greatly boosts ratings. Ratings equal money. Cable channels like CNN and MSNBC depend on mega-stories for audience and profitability. On cable, MSNBC in particular has become the noxious home of the techno-tragedy and scandal, increasingly melding its obsessive coverage with its online prescence. Increasingly techno-media like cable present civics as shrieking confrontations, not obviously, because it's informative but because it's entertaining. Politicians screaming about the impact of Jerry Springer on kids would be spending their time more wisely looking at the civic screamers on cable.
In an environment like the Kennedy tragedy coverage - much technology, many emotional images, no news -- the atmosphere becomes surreal. There are few facts but endless amounts of time, space, cyber and air, to fill. Yet the images are so ubiquitous as to be Orwellian.
John Kennedy Jr. and his father were strikingly different figures, historically, a reality also being lost in the overwhelming volume of coverage. The elder Kennedy desperately wanted elective office, and articulated strong political visions. His son didn't.
The younger Kennedy was not the icon, symbol, or defining personality for young Americans, especially the increasingly important and influential generation building the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Kennedy Jr. was much more of a traditional, mainstream Eastern journalistic and political celebrity. He seemed disinterested in the young's most interesting, transcendent contemporary accomplishment -- the Internet. That says nothing bad about him, but it undermines the notion that the symbolic moral and cultural leader of the next generation has been cut down in the prime of life.
Sad as it us, the news from Martha's Vineyard ultimately says more about technology than it does about any individual people.
How do we deal with the fact that the very institutions we depend on for clarity and perspective provide neither? And that technology itself is becoming the end, not the means for some of our most powerful media?
Thanks to technology, images move quickly. Truth and clarity lags far behind. When it comes to sorting out the difference, we are on our own.
Doesn't anyone else think the media has gone too far? I mean, 5 STRAIGHT days of coverage is a little extreme for an accident. Don't get me wrong, I think it was horrible tragety and deserved some of the coverage it got, but I'm not interested in hearing MSNBC's conolations.
And what about the Coast Gaurd/Navy/NTSB investigtion. FIVE DAYS. I'd like to think I'd get that kind of goverment support if I crashed my Cessna into the ocean, but the truth is that if this happened to anyone else, it would hardly get a 5-minute segment on the LOCAL news.
I guess this shows that royalty is alive and well in America.
I think John Katz raises some very important points. These days, there exists in many ways almost _too_ much media, at least from a traditional standpoint. This media often blows even small things way out of proportion. These days, anyone who can get a small group of people together and really rattle some sabers can get _national_ attention! However, as annoying and unhelpful as this is, and as much as it skews the signal to noise ratio, even these trivialities cannot compete in the least with the media hype over this "tragedy." I personally barely knew anything of Kennedy Jr. I had a vague awareness that he existed. Beyond that, I did not even know what he looked like until recently. Yet, he is supposedly an "icon" of "our" generation. I bet that *at least* half of the people I frequently associate with know less than I do of Kennedy Jr. The only real important "news" in this whole event was:
1) Kennedy's plane was missing.
2) The bodies of the people on board were found.
That is _IT_. Everything else (beyond perhaps some details about the investigation into the cause of the crash and what not) is FLUFF. Pure, unadulterated media hype fluff. Amercians are being bred on the stuff, and it is not exactly healthy. Of course, beyond that, I figured exactly what kind of "public sorrow" and that sort of CRAP this would generate and chose not to watch any news of any sort for a few days.. for example a month might do the trick. You people want something to grieve about? Grieve about something worthy! You know what this kind of coverage in essence costs? Why don't you funnel it elsewhere, such as aiding in _REAL_TRAGEDIES_OCCURRING_EVERY_FREAKING_DAY_. There are many MANY people and families out there that have many more problems than the Kennedies. The Kennedies have been famous, in the limelight, rich etc. etc. Simply read the description of Kennedy Jr.'s life. Sure, his father died when he was young, but _many_ peoples fathers have died when they were young. Beyond that, look at what else happened in his life. Hardly looks like a tragedy to me. Wealthy, educated at Brown University, comfortable etc. I wish the media would just back off on these types of issues. Or at the very least, cover 10 of the everyday tragedies that occur in many peoples lives for every one "tragedy" that happens to a famous person. Well, I better stop ranting because I have already wasted enough time on this issue. If I were anyone out there, I wouldn't waste my time watching the news for a while, and I wouldn't bother thinking about this crap either. Thank you and good night.
Yes, he was a luser. Think about it:
No flight plan? The luser will whine "but he didn't have to file a flight plan" and yes, you donw have to type pwd before rm *, but is is a very good idea, proven by experience.
No survival gear? When I was flying, years ago, that wasn't an option -- people would complain about the weight all the time. The lusers will say "but he wasn't required to carry gear" and yes, you aren't required to do your backups either, are you?
Flying at night, visual, with so few hours? WTF? I guess "deathwish" is a little strong, but that is really, really dumb. The lusers will say "but he thought that he would be OK." I don't know how to categorize the stupidity here.
Flying with passengers this way. That makes him a killer, just like his uncle, except he couldn't swim to safety.
At least he helped clean out the gene pool a little.
Any votes for Darwin Awards?
But where does all this "blow to a generation" come from? Honestly, people die all of the time in more tragic ways, and nobody bats an eyelash. Are people's lives so pathetically boring that they have to take the events in other people's lives and make them their own? All I can figure is that people like this kind of stuff because it gives them something to care about. Why they have nothing in their own lives to worry about, I won't pretend to understand.
Or maybe we should just lock the door of the cabin and post "No Trespassin'" signs around our property and try to forget about that whole "Outside World" thing.
And what exactly is "clean"? I mean, don't you think that Slashdot might just possibly have a eensy-weensy little bit of bias in the way it sets up discussions? I mean, do you *really* think this just started with Katz?
Look, take your own advice: If you have Katz, don't read 'em; you can even set your prefs so that you don't even have to look at his articles. If you still insist on "contaminating" yourself, why don't you go bitch to your dog or someone else who cares about it?
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Heard on the radio yesterday that
JFK Jr. had said that he didn't know if he actually remembered his time in the white house as a small child or only thought he remembered because he had seen and heard so much about it.
The media has always been about supplying what the public wants to view, and this is something that is continued to this day. Many people I have talked to recently regarding the plane crash have taken the viewpoint that the media should show some modicum of responsibility for the content that it provides the public, rather than sensationalising that which they know will draw public attention.
A lot of people complain about the crap that is aired on the media and the lack of substantial content that is immediately relevant to our own lives, but do we really want the media telling us what is relevant to us? I am happy with things the way they are, I see nothing but fluff in the daily news each night, crowd drawing spectaculars of fire and noise and death, but I am happy feeling that this is not important to me, that instead of attempting to tell me what I should know, they are showing what they think people will watch. We are in the James Cameron era, where wonderful light and sound and camera angles emotional traps are commonplace and are the magic which the media uses to draw its crowds.
The media is the new cinema - watch it, listen to what it says, but don't allow them to tell you what is important.
I say I ain't giving you no tree fiddy you goddamned Loch Ness monster, get yo own goddamned money!
strangers who couldn't possibly have any first-hand knowledge of the principals in a far-off tragedy like this -are affected as grievously as family and friends.
This is the thing that scares me the most about our modern media-frenzied culture; I think the trend runs precisely contrary to Katz's idea here, that what what we are seeing is the cheapening of tragedy and suffering; people are being affected "as grievously as family and friends" not because they feel somehow connected to the incident, but becauyse they have become disconnected from those that should matter to them. We have cheapened mourning and made it a media event. We think a family's suffering is something to be gawked at. So what happens when a calamity hits home? Instead of learning about grief through personal grieving and relation with family and friends who are grieving, we learn about it mostly from watching others on the far side of a satellite disconnect.
Techno-tragedies are driven by images rather than judgement, significance, reasoning or content.
I fear that this is becoming the case in politics, family, religion, and education as well. It's just easiest to see in a media event, er, family tragedy like this one.
-=Maggie Leber=-
login. set your thresholds to -1, and hit "do not
display scores." uncheck "willing to moderate."
this is the only way to read slashdot. i am
totally unwilling to let people i don't know judge
posts i haven't read to determine whether they're
appropriate for my own consumption.
i can make that decision on my own, thankyouverymuch.
No offense to Katz, but we always have been on our own. Only in the early days of Usenet was the signal to noise ratio high enough that killfiles were only necessary on the really high volume groups.
The point of Free Press is that ALL the ideas can get out there. It is up to you and me to figure out which ideas are worth hacking on and which are in the realm of bovine scatology (thanks, Norm). Journalism thinks it has this gatekeeper function... it does not. The fact that it thinks it does means I no longer get my news from corporate entities based on this continent.
Yes, it's annoying when the Big Boys interrupt the ballgame to tell us that they haven't found John-John yet. Waste a few sheets of paper and write a formal protest and maybe they won't do it next time. (Sending email isn't enough; they're not required to keep it for the station logs for their FCC review. They are required to keep snailmail.) But other than that, vote with your feet for your news.
I read Neal Boortz, a noted Libertarian talk show host who always has pointers to the political outrage(s)-du-jour,
In short, stop whining, and vote with your feet.
(Kudos to Taco, this is the FIRST John-John story I've seen on
>At least Princess Di was an incredibly benevolent person.
I was with you right up until this last part. It seems to contradict your argument. I'm not saying she wasn't, but how would any of us really know? Based on media coverage (and we all know how un-biased that always is, right?)
- Unplug television from wall outlet.
- Place wire clippers in preferred hand.
- Firmly grasp power cord in other hand.
- Clip the plug from the cord.
Your television has now been restored to its best possible operating condition.-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Oh my god! They killed Kennedy!! You bastards!
JFK Jr died? How come no one tells me these things?
There's also the small matter of MT going in to help the poor in areas where "population explosion" is a meaningful phrase, while steadfastly maintaining that birth control Is A Sin.
Things like that. I can understand why it would be "controversial" to continue to apply what is essentially a band-aid solution to the problem, even if it is at great personal cost.
*shrug*
For that matter, some of the Catholic saints are not-so-saintly when you THINK about what they did. And the whole "virgin martyr" thing is ridiculous -- if a girl jumped out of a window to avoid being raped today, and died, we'd have sympathy but we wouldn't call her a martyr.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
[Disclaimer: I've got my own problems with the Columbine coverage, as those who read my earlier post on the thread are probably aware.]
First, in defense of JonKatz, he was covering an angle of the Columbine tragedy that a lot of people were trying very very hard to ignore.
Secondly, a hell of a lot more than three people died. Third, the perpetrators weren't already celebrities. Fourth, people like Diana Spencer and John F. Kennedy Jr. were only celebrities by marriage and birth respectively.
Over-reported stories about JFK Jr, Princess Di, JonBenet Ramsey, etc. are pure celebrity gossip disguised as news. Over-reported stories about Columbine, about cases like Matthew Shephard's murder, even about something like PanAm 103, are over-reported to draw attention to possible underlying causes of the specific over-reported tragedy.
It does get tiring, yes, and I do get sick of the "How could this have happened HERE?" but there is an underlying nobility of purpose that is just not present in reports of most celebrity deaths. Now, if something useful like MADD and SADD drumming up a lot of publicity after Princess Di's death had happened, that could have crossed the line back over. And there are cases that are a mixture of the two -- deaths of popular entertainers, especially musicians, due to drugs, DWI, or more recently, AIDS, sometimes are symbolized as an awareness of the problem. And this is a good thing.
The coverage of Columbine, especially with all the angles it eventually took, blew the lid off of a lot of problems. Endless coverage of celebrity deaths without much about the underlying cause is just a lot of mental masturbation.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
... you consider "computer" to be a necessary and therefore unstated modifier of "nerd."
There's a fair amount of "English nerds" (like me) on
The point Katz is trying to make, as I see it, is that over time, technology has made it increasingly easier to saturate the media with non-stories. Meanwhile, "stuff that matters" is getting ignored. THAT matters, in and of itself.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
This reminds me of Kurt Cobain's death. A group of students in my Mass Media and Popular Culture class were discussing it (this is right after it happened), and in comes our professor announcing to all and sundry that John Lennon's death was much more meaningful and that how sorry she felt for our generation because we didn't have that kind of hero.
Um, pardon me, but I like Lennon's music much better than Cobain's, anyhow. And Kurt Cobain ain't no cultural icon, folks -- he was arguably a talented musician (though not my style), but he was no hero of mine.
Freddie Mercury's death affected me much more, though he doesn't belong to "my" generation. Queen wasn't exactly popular here post-1981 except among Highlander fans, but because suddenly AIDS is this big trendy thing and is how Mercury died, we get silliness in the same music press that used to hate Queen about how they were kind of cool after all for inspiring Guns N Roses.
That was annoying, sure, but to have the same press (and this time, with the addition of non-music folks) falling all over itself praising Kurt Cobain, who if nothing else hadn't lived long enough to create as extensive a collection of music as Freddie Mercury had, was just ridiculous.
I don't see why it's so necessary to take snapshot "icons" of a generation, anyhow. It's not like they prove anything. Lucille Ball didn't represent my mother's family growing up.
And it's all very sweet to go on and on about Camelot and the end of the era of innocence, but what this ignores is that for many if not most people, the "innocence" had been lost long ago. My parents have stories from their days growing up about mentally ill family members that they had to "hide" from their friends, hard times due to strikes, being told "your parents don't love you because they won't send you to Catholic school," putting up with "dumb Polak" slurs despite being the class valedictorian, etc.
Camelot? Yeah, sure. But what about the masses outside the gates?
It's the same thing that (for me) made the Littleton coverage so damned annoying -- "How could this happen here, in our nice white upper-middle-class suburb? We're Nice People! We are the American Dream!"
Feh. America needs to stop dreaming and wake up. The "American Dream" has never once included everyone. At best, it creates isolated pockets of "haves" that promote the illusion that everyone's got it that good. *sigh*
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
I think the short answer is that people are
fascinated with celebrities because these
celebrities appear in the media.
Suppose I own a magazine. Being a good
capitalist, I want to maximize the number of
issues that I sell. I don't think it's a big
leap to see that it's in my self-interest to
do everything I can to identify certain people
as inherently newsworthy and persuade my
readers that they should consume any material
related to these newsworthies. Whether this
newsworthiness is somehow defensible (in the
case of politicians, artists, technologists)
or not (pop musicians, glitterati) is immaterial.
So, if I can persuade you that JFKJ is a person
you should be interested in because he's
good-looking, rich and the son of a former
president, I can make more money. If throwing
in meaningless adjectives like "hero to a
generation" pumps the bottom line, so much the
better.
People end up caring about these media projections
because their peers do, because there are
billion-dollar companies trying to get them to
care and because it distracts them from their
lives (who of us has a life that can match the
non-stop excitement of that of a media-mediated
celebrity?).
I believe that this issue is at heart a
sociological, not a technical, issue. The
newspapers in my city (Globe & Mail, Toronto Star,
Toronto Sun and National Post) all devoted
above-the-fold pictures and headlines to the
JFKJ incident for several days.
SS
You can never be too rich, thin or cynical.